Documente Academic
Documente Profesional
Documente Cultură
John S. Nelson
John D. Peters
The Rhetoric
of Economics
SECOND EDITION
DEIRDRE N. McCLOSKEY
Ad universitatem Iowae,
montuosam, humanam, urbanam,
quamvis in fustibus positam.
CONTENTS
20
35
vii
viii
Contents
The Master Tropes Rule Economics:
The Case of Robert Solow 48
52
74
87
100
ix
Contents
That Is, the Speech Acts of Scientists Are
Conversations, Good or Bad 107
The Conversation on Purchasing Power Parity,
for Example, Is Rhetorically Muddled 109
112
139
10
156
ANTI-ANTI-RHETORIC
168
Contents
The Philosophical Objections to Rhetoric
Are Not Persuasive 179
Anti-Modernism Is Nice 183
Rhetoric Is Good for You 184
12
Bibliography 195
Index 219
187
PREFACE TO THE
SECOND EDITION
xii
Preface
Arrangement has never been my strong suit as a rhetorician, and I
arranged the book badly. Specifically, I opened it badly. A lot of people
thought that the main point of the book was contained in the opening
complaint about positivism and its wider context, "modernism." After
all, the first three chapters in the first edition were "philosophical." The
article in the Journal of Economic Literature in 1983 that first announced
the argument was essentially these chapters. If you took the 1983 article as a precis of the book you were going to miss the point.
What's the point? As I said: that economics is literary. My book was
an early case study (not the first) in the rhetoric of science. That is, like
earlier work by Maurice Finocchiaro on Galileo (1980), back through
Thomas Kuhn and his master, Ludwick Fleck (1935), I was looking at
science as persuasion. My own science of economics was literary, like
physics (Feyerabend 1975, 1978, Bazerman 1981, 1983, 1984, 1988) or
mathematics (Lakatos 1976; Steiner 1975) or biology (Gould 1977, 1981,
1984), a persuasive realm where the work was done by human arguments, not godlike Proof.
The point was obscured by the organization of the book. Most reviewers did not read beyond the third chapter, quite rightly-I mean,
how much of this amateur philosophy are you supposed to put up
with? (If you want more you can have all you want in my third book on
the subject, Knowledge and Persuasion in Economics [1994], 396 pages of
philosophical answers to critics and philosophical extensions of the
first three chapters. Its contents are proof that most critics read the book
as philosophical.)
I should have started The Rhetoric with the concrete readings of economic texts. I should have brought the practical rhetoric to a climax
with the major case study, which shows that all this stuff does have
some scientific payoff: my complaints about statistical significance.
(Not about statistics understand. I am and remain a quantitative lady.
Hurrah for statistics. Real science. But against that particular and dominant technique, declares Aunt Deirdre, the Marianne of modern economic science, aux barricades! Down with the boy's game in a sandbox
called statistical "significance" and Student's-t!) Then I should have
shown the wider cultural significance of The Case of Economics by
showing it to be an instance of "modernism." I should not have started
with this last, wider, and philosophical point.
So that's what I have done with the new edition. I have started with
what I consider the most interesting and original ingredients of my
stew, which is the close reading of economic writings. I've added an
opening chapter that gets right down to work, "How to Do a Rhetorical Analysis of Economics, and Why," and later a detailed rhetorical
xiii
Preface
study of a famous paper by Ronald Coase. I've rewritten the book
where I can see small changes in expression that might make it clearer.
I've tried to drop the boring passages, but you know how authors are
about boring passages that they wrote. I've added a few more references, and have made two additional bibliographies, one a bibliography on the rhetoric of economics as I understand it and the other a list
of the reviews of the first edition that I know of.
To get the whole picture of What I Now Believe, though, I ask you to
read my other books, the Knowledge one, and the earlier If You're So
Smart: The Narrative of Economic Expertise (1990), and then the fourth,
The Vices of Economists; The Virtues of the Bourgeoisie (1997a). Buy them
in bulk. They make excellent Christmas presents. The three down to
1994 are a trilogy (well, there are three of them aren't there?), with the
1997 one a sort of satyr play added on the end. The Rhetoric is, I see
now, a poetics of economics, focusing on metaphor. See if you don't
agree. If You're So Smart was more or less self-consciously a narratology of economics, focusing on its stories. I explain there why I regard
metaphor and story as the two possibilities of thought. Knowledge was,
as I have said, the philosophical finish to the trilogy, and explains
where all this fits or fails to fit into philosophical traditions. And The
Vices tries to draw the moral for the future of the field. In our charmless economic jargon, it contains the "policy prescription" following
the first three books.
I have supplied in the present book a brief postscript, "Since
Rhetoric: Prospects for a Scientific Economics." Its point is that a scientific economics can emerge through acknowledging the literary side.
Not acknowledging it has by now made us economists stupidly unscientific. It's a feminist point: a human is stupid who acknowledges only
his masculine side. A man is not weakened by being a whole human
being. Likewise, an economist is not weakened by getting out of the
sandbox he has played in since the 1940s.
I am hoping that the effect of the new edition is different from that of
the first. The first confused a lot of philosophically oriented economists.
They kept thinking they had me in various philosophical traps and
were annoyed that I didn't seem to care, strolling around with bear
traps clinging to my legs. I didn't care because the book was not primarily philosophical. It was rhetorical. The rest of the economist readers, or at any rate readers of the title of the book, grasped the bare idea
that economists argue things-not much of a discovery, though worth
having. The word "rhetoric" is more common in economics than before
I wrote. (The power of the test is small, though: the word is more common everywhere, because we are seeing a revival of classical rhetoric.)
xiv
Preface
I hope the second edition will lead economists and noneconomists to
see the field as it is, as part of the larger conversation of humankind.
Economists are poets / But don't know it. Economists are storytellers
without a clue. Economists are philosophers who don't study philosophy. Economists are scientists who don't know even now that their science has become a boy's game in a sandbox. Let's get serious, fellas.
(The gals already know there's something wrong.)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
FOR THE FIRST EDITION
xvi
Acknowledgments
nomics." The intense intellectuality of the groups at Australian National in economic history, economics, philosophy, and history of ideas
was wonderful, and I was especially fortunate to overlap for a month
with Richard Rorty. Talking to him, and reading his book Philosophy and
the Mirror of Nature, made many things clear.
I then dined out on the work for years. In the antipodes during 1982
seminars heard the paper at Australian National itself; Adelaide, Melbourne, Monash, New South Wales, and Western Australia; and Auckland and Victoria University of Wellington. Although everywhere I
was startled at the warmth of the reception economists gave to a paper
critical of their way of talking, the reception at the University of Tasmania was especially inspiriting. Back home in the United States one or
another chapter was given to the Speech Communication Association's
Third Conference on Argumentation at Alta, Utah, in 1983; to the Conference on Codes at the Humanities Center of Brooklyn College, CUNY,
in 1983; to the Rhetoric of Economics conference at Middlebury College
in 1984; to the Temple University /Speech Communication Association
Conference on Kenneth Burke at Philadelphia in 1984; and to the American Economic Association convention at Dallas in 1984.
Seminars at the World Bank, the National Science Foundation, the
Washington Area Economic History Workshop, the Columbia Economic History Seminar, and Miami University of Ohio heard pieces, as
did groups at the universities of British Columbia, California at Davis,
Chicago, Connecticut, Nebraska, the Pacific, Pennsylvania, Toronto,
Virginia; Baruch (CUNY), Grinnell, Queens (CUNY), Union, and
Williams colleges; and Ball State, Emory, Indiana, Iowa State, McMaster, North Carolina State, Princeton, Rutgers, Simon Fraser, Wesleyan,
and Yale universities. Each audience raised points that had escaped me,
which shows that even now I don't know what I am talking about. No
wonder. Like oratory, argument depends for its virtues on the virtues of
its audience, and develops as a conversation. Unlike machines, conversations are by nature surprising.
Fred Carstensen, A. W. Coats, Stanley Engerman, Arjo Klamer, Robert
Higgs, Thomas Mayer, and Robert Solow wrote comments on the work
early and often. Many other economists and economic historians have
commented in writing on drafts of the chapters or on published papers,
many at length and repeatedly. The commentary by economistsfavorable or unfavorable-has been inspiring and enlightening. I am
uneasily aware that this list misses some, but down to the date of publication it included Irma Adelman, Moses Abramovitz, J. D. Alexander,
Edward Ames, Peter Bauer, M. Cristina Bicchieri, Mark Blaug, Richard
Boltuck, Thomas Borcherding, William Breit, Martin Bronfenbrenner,
xvii
Acknowledgments
James Buchanan, Phillip Cagan, Bruce Caldwell, Rondo Cameron, Filippo Cesarano, Gregory Clark, Robert Clower, Ronald Coase, John
Cochrane, Gordon Crovitz, Stephen De Canio, Arthur Diamond, J. E.
Easley, Jr., Billy Eatherly, David Felix, Alex Field, Robert Fogel, Milton
Friedman, Walter Galenson, Allan Gibbard, Claudia Goldin, Robert
Goodin, Robert Gordon, Frank Hahn, Gary Hawke, Robert Heilbroner,
Willie Hendersen, Abraham Hirsch, Albert Hirschman, A. B. Holmes,
J. R. T. Hughes, Eric Jones, Charles Kindleberger, David Landes, Timothy Lane, Richard Langlois, John Latham, Edward Learner, Nathaniel
Leff, Harvey Leibenstein, Axel Leijonhufvud, Wassily Leontief, David
Levy, H. G. Lewis, Peter Lindert, Rodney Maddock, Neil de Marchi,
Terry Marsh, John Martin, Thomas McCaleb, Michael McPherson, Pedro
Carvalho de Mello, Philip Mirowski, David Mitch, Richard Nathan,
Charles Nelson, Richard Nelson, D. P. O'Brien, Avner Offer, Ian Parker,
William Parker, Mark Perlman, Boris Pesek, Sidney Ratner, Joseph D.
Reid, Jr., Robert Renshaw, Vernon Ruttan, T. W. Schultz, Amartya Sen,
Martin Spechler, Frank Spooner, Paul Streeten, John Thorkelson,
Thomas Ulen, Larry Westphal, Oliver Williamson, Gordon Winston,
Gavin Wright, and Leland Yeager.
The implied reader of the book is an economist, but I have tried to
make the argument intelligible and persuasive to noneconomists as
well. On this score and others the detailed remarks by my staunch
friends Wayne Booth and Richard Rorty on various versions, especially
on the next-to-Iast draft, were immensely useful. Without their advice
the book would have been even more obviously simpleminded about
literary theory and philosophy.
The other noneconomists who wrote to me about drafts in one form
or another include (here I suspect even more that I am overlooking
some) Keith Baker, Charles Bazerman, Howard Becker, Robert Boynton, Bernard Cohn, Harry Collins, John Comaroff, Colin Day, Mary
Douglas, Otis Dudley Duncan, Stanley Fish, James O. Freedman, Elizabeth Fricker, Clifford Geertz, Gerald Geison, Nelson Goodman, Allen
Graubard, Stephen Graubard, Joseph Gusfield, Daniel Hausman, Martin Hollis, Martin Kessler, J. Morgan Kousser, William Kruskal, John
Laffey, Laurence Lafore, Donald Levine, Leonard Liggio, Michael Mahoney, Donald Marshall, Laura McCloskey, William McNeill, Franklin
Mendels, Denton Morrison, Peter Novick, Samuel Patterson, Amelie
Oksenberg Rorty, Renato Rosaldo, Martin Rudwick, John Schuster, Herbert Simons, Donald Sutherland, Stephen Toulmin, and David Warsh.
Humanists are less startled than economists by the message that technical economics involves literary, ethical, and rhetorical issues.
lowe financial debts for the final work on the book to the John Simon
xviii
Acknowledgments
Guggenheim Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the National Endowment for the Humanities (for its program in
Humanities, Science, and Technology, and especially David E. Wright),
and the University of Iowa. The time away from other duties during
1983-1984 brought the book substantially to its present form. My editor
at Wisconsin, Gordon Massman, was encouraging well beyond the call
of profit, exhibiting bourgeois virtue. He initiated at Wisconsin this
series in the rhetoric of inquiry. Ginalie Swaim and Carolyn Moser
exercised extraordinary care and intelligence on the manuscript and
improved it. (My loving assistant Deborah Reese typed the second
edition.)
Looking again at the writings most important to my thinking is embarrassing. Ideas and even forms of words that I had come to imagine
were my own turn out to have been pillaged from Paul Feyerabend,
Wayne Booth, Michael Polanyi, Stephen Toulmin, Richard Rorty,
Thomas Kuhn, and Kenneth Burke (in order of the major pillagings,
from 1980 to 1984). Later I stole from Michael Mulkay and Arjo Klamer.
The only comfort is another phrase from Rorty (which he in turn borrowed from Michael Oakeshott) of intellectual life as a conversation,
now in parts some three thousand years old. We should, after all, be influenced by our interlocutors, and should take over as our own their
forms of words.
EXORDIUM
xix
xx
Exordium
to lynch the accused, but also persuading readers that a novel's characters breathe, or bringing scientists to accept the better argument and reject the worse. The newspaper definition is Little Rhetoric. I am talking
about Big Rhetoric.
In Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent Wayne Booth gives many
useful definitions. Rhetoric is "the art of probing what men believe they
ought to believe, rather than proving what is true according to abstract
methods"; it is "the art of discovering good reasons, finding what really
warrants assent, because any reasonable person ought to be persuaded"; it is "careful weighing of more-or-Iess good reasons to arrive
at more-or-Iess probable or plausible conclusions-none too secure but
better than what would be arrived at by chance or unthinking impulse"; it is the "art of discovering warrantable beliefs and improving
those beliefs in shared discourse"; its purpose must not be "to talk
someone else into a preconceived view; rather, it must be to engage in
mutual inquiry" (Booth 1974a, pp. xiii, xiv, 59, xiii, 137).
The question is whether the scientist-who usually fancies herself an
announcer of "results" or a stater of "conclusions" free of rhetoricspeaks rhetorically. Does she try to persuade? I think so. Language, I just
said, is not a solitary accomplishment. The scientist doesn't speak into
the void, or to herself. She speaks to a community of voices. She desires
to be heeded, praised, published, imitated, honored, loved. These are
the desires. The devices of language are the means.
Rhetoric, to make a little joke with the definition of economics that
helped make it narrow and sleepwalking, is the proportioning of means
to desires in speech. Rhetoric is an economics of language, the study of
how scarce means are allocated to the insatiable desires of people to be
heard. It seems on the face of it a reasonable hypothesis that economists
are like other people in being talkers who desire listeners when they go
to the library or the computer center as much as when they go to the office or the polling booth. The purpose here is to see if this is true, and
to see if it is useful: to study the rhetoric of economic science. The subject is science. It is not the economy, or the adequacy of economic theory as a description of the economy, or even mainly the economist's role
in the economy. The subject is the conversation economists have among
themselves, for purposes of persuading each other that the interest elasticity of demand for investment is zero or that the money supply is controlled by the Federal Reserve.
The purpose of thinking about how economists converse with each
other is to help the field mature as a science, not to attack it. Economics
is unsuccessful as social weather forecasting, a role forced on it by the
rhetoric of politics and journalism. But it is strikingly successful as so-
xxi
Exordium
cial history, or would be if it would stop sleepwalking in its rhetoric.
Economics, like geology or evolutionary biology or history itself, is an
historical rather than a predictive science. Economics is not widely regarded as an imposing creation of the human mind. But I think it is. It
is social self-understanding (a critical theory, indeed, like Marxism or
psychoanalysis), as remarkable as anthropology or history. All the more
pity that economists have in the past fifty years become idiot savants of
modernism. It's time for them to wake up and get serious about their
scientific rhetoric.
The service that literature can do for economics is to offer literary
criticism as a model for self-understanding. (It would not be a very good
model for polite behavior or even, I am afraid, literary style.) Literary
criticism does not merely pass judgements of good or bad; in its more
recent forms the question of good or bad hardly comes up. Mainly it's
concerned with making readers see how poets and novelists accomplish their results. An economic criticism of the sort exercised here is
not a way of attacking economics, showing it to be bad because it is
rhetorical. To repeat, everyone is rhetorical, from the mathematician to
the lawyer. A literary criticism of economics is just a way of showing
how economics accomplishes its results.
Not many economists think this way. A larger though small proportion of other social scientists do: literary thinking is common in anthropology and sociology. What the French call the "human sciences" generally-the disciplines, from English to paleoanthropology, that study
humankind-can assemble nowadays quite a few people who think critically in a rhetorical sense. And many people in mathematics, physics,
computer science, engineering, biology, paleontology, communication,
political science, law, sociology, anthropology, archaeology, history, history of science, philosophy, theology, comparative literature, and English have done rhetorical criticism without realizing they are doing it.
I explore a rhetoric of inquiry in economics. I use and ancient rhetorical device, the figure a fortiori, "from the stronger": if even the economic
study of hog farmers and railroads is literary as well as mathematical,
if even the science of human maximization under constraints is part of
the humanities as much as it is part of the sciences, then all the stronger
is the hope for the rest.
HOW TO DO A RHETORICAL
ANALYSIS OF ECONOMICS,
AND WHY
of Law:
Our survey of the major common law fields suggests that the
common law exhibits a deep unity that is economic in character....
The common law method is to allocate responsibilities between
people engaged in interacting activities in such a way as to
maximize the joint value ... of the activities .... [T]he judge
can hardly fail to consider whether the loss was the product of
wasteful, uneconomical resource use. In culture of scarcity, this
is an urgent, an inescapable question. (Posner 1972, pp. 98f.)
Posner is urging us to see the common law as economically efficient.
That's the philosophical way of reading the passage, seeing through.
But look at the surface, the rhetoric.
The argument is carried in part by the equivocal use of economic vocabulary. '~llocate," "maximize," "value," and "scarcity" are technical
words in economics, with precise definitions. Here they are used also in
wider senses, to evoke Scientific power, to claim precision without necessarily using it. The sweetest turn is the use of "uneconomical," which
is not a technical word in economics, but encapsulates Posner's argument that in their courtrooms the judges follow economic models because to do otherwise would be "wasteful." The "economical/uneconomical" figure of speech supports the claim that economic arguments
(arguments about efficiency) are pervasive in the law. The claim is hammered home by treble repetition (technically in classical rhetoric, com3
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11
12
13
And Novelists
The word "story" is not vague in literary criticism. Gerald Prince used some ingenious mental experiments with stories and
nonstories to formulate a definition of the "minimal story," which has
three conjoined events. The first and third events are stative
[such as "Korea was poor"], the second is active [such as "then
Koreans educated themselves"]. Furthermore, the third event
is the inverse of the first [such as "Then as a result Korea was
rich"] .... The three events are conjoined by conjunctive features
in such a way that (a) the first event precedes the second in time
and the second precedes the third, and (b) the second event
causes the third. (Prince 1973, p. 31)
14
Poland was poor, then it adopted capitalism, then as a result it became rich.
The money supply increased this year, then, as a result, productivity last
year rose and the business cycle three decades ago peaked.
A few firms existed in chemicals, then they merged, and then only one
firm existed.
Britain in the later nineteenth century was capitalistic and rich and powerful.
The pattern is story / nonstory / story / nonstory.
Stories end in a new state. If a 5 percent tax on gasoline is said by
some congressman or journalist to be "designed" to fall entirely on producers the economist will complain, saying "It's not an equilibrium."
"Not an equilibrium" is the economist's way of saying that she disputes
the ending proposed by some untutored person. Any descendant of
Adam Smith, left or right, whether by way of Marx or Marshall, Veblen
or Menger, will be happy to tell you a better story.
Many of the scientific disagreements inside economics turn on this
sense of an ending. To an eclectic Keynesian, raised on picaresque tales
of economic surprise, the story idea Oil prices went up, which caused inflation is full of meaning, having the merits that stories are supposed to
have. But to a monetarist, raised on the classical unities of money, it
seems incomplete, no story at all, a flop. As the economist A. C. Harberger likes to say, it doesn't make the economics "sing." It ends too
soon, half-way through the second act: a rise in oil prices without some
corresponding fall elsewhere is "not an equilibrium."
From the other side, the criticism of monetarism by Keynesians is
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16
17
Writing Is Performance
The point is not peculiar to deconstruction. In a way it
is one of the chief findings of humanism. Books do not "reproduce" the
world. They evoke it. Skillful fiction, whether in the form of Northanger
Abbey or The Origin of Species, "stimulates us to supply what is not there,"
as Virginia Woolf remarked of Austen. "What she offers is, apparently,
a trifle, yet is composed of something that expands in the reader's mind
and endows with the most enduring form of life scenes which are outwardly trivial" (1925, p. 142). Commenting on her remark in turn, the
critic Wolfgang Iser put it this way: "What is missing from the apparently trivial scenes, the gaps arising out of the dialogue-this is what
stimulates the reader into filling the blanks with projections. [Iser's
image is of the reader running a motion picture inside his head, which
is, of course, why novels can still compete with television.] ... The 'enduring form of life' which Virginia Woolf speaks of is not manifested on
the printed page; it is a product arising out of the interaction between
text and reader" (1980, pp. 110-11).
As Arjo Klamer (1987) has shown for the postulate of economic rationality, scientific persuasion, too, is like that. Persuasion of the most
rigorous kind has blanks to be filled at every other step, whether it is
18
19
Fact
Story
particular
Axis of Particularity
Logic
Metaphor
impersonal
personal
general
Axis of Impersonality
Figure 1. The Rhetorical Tetrad: The Four Human Arguments
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The Literary Character of Economic Science
ble jewels of the discipline. The claim here is not the vulgar and modernist figure of logic that economics is mere humanism because it is a
failure as a science. The claim is that all science is humanism (and no
"mere" about it) because that is all there is for humans.
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25
26
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The Literary Character of Economic Science
introspection). Or in properly modernist (i.e., behaviorist) fashion you
can observe what arguments an economist uses when trying to persuade unbelievers, such as students. Much of her argument will rely on
introspection, encouraging the students to examine theirs and improve
it by critical thinking. She will exhibit the few cases in point she can remember, especially the more extreme cases such as the oil crisis, and
will try to build on analogy with products that the students do believe
follow the law. For the rest she will appeal to the identity of convex utility functions and the authority of the scientific tradition. No matter
how sophisticated the class is, it will be a rare teacher, and a poor one,
who relies much on the econometric results from the data mine and its
miners.
Economic scientists, then, persuade with many devices, and as speakers have an audience. To repeat, they do not speak into the void: the
rhetorical character of science makes it social. The final product of science, the scientific article, is a performance. It is no more separated from
other literary performances by epistemology than pastoral poetry is
separated from epic by epistemology. Epistemology is not to the point.
Literary thinking is.
Linguistics Is an Appropriate
Model for Economic Science
Here is a longer example of how economists can gain
from looking at their subject with literary models in mind: linguistics.
To quantitative intellectuals it is evident that the great achievement of
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was physics. To literary intellectuals [bracketing the perfection of the novel] it is equally evident
that linguistics was. The styles of thought considered prestigious are
determined by adherence to one or the other of these two models. Economics since Samuelson's Foundations of Economic Analysis (1947) has
looked on nineteenth-century physics as its model. Perhaps it should
try twentieth-century linguistics.
The founder of modern linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure, devoted
many pages of his Course in General Linguistics (1915, pp. 79ff., 115ff.) to
the analogy between economics and his new linguistics. It is notable that
a scientist as important for economics as Saussure was for linguistics,
Leon Walras, flourished at the same time in the same nation, and had
similar ideas about the salience of what economists would call crosssectional and comparative static thinking. The motto of both was
" Everything touches everything else, today."
29
The Literary Character of Economic Science
Saussure distinguished two approaches to understanding societies,
the diachronic and the synchronic. The diachronic (Greek for "through
time") was the historical, dynamic, or (as economists would say) timeseries approach typical of the linguistics of his day. It traced the history
of words and grammar, showing how Latin calidus became by stages
French chaud. Saussure noted, however, that a speaker of French in 1910
did not need to know any of this to communicate with other speakers:
she needed to know only the system of oppositions and analogies extant
in 1910 that allowed her to distinguish chaud from froid. A historical linguistics, in other words, interesting though it was in its own right, could
shed no light on how people used language at anyone time.
What was needed to understand the way a language worked at any
one time was a synchronic ("same time") linguistics, an ahistorical, static,
cross-sectional account of how one French speaker speaks to another.
The two linguistics were, and had to be, distinct: it would make no difference to a French speaker if some historical chance had left her with
the word heiss or hot instead of chaud, so long as she could keep the opposition of X against froid (and against various other things, such as cabbage or cat). Synchronic and diachronic linguistics, in Saussure's view,
had to be separate sciences, one aligned along the "axis of successions"
and the other along the "axis of simultaneties." Listen to how much
Saussure sounds like an economist:
For a science concerned with values the distinction is a practical
necessity and sometimes an absolute one. In these fields scholars
cannot organize their research rigorously without considering
both co-ordinates and making a distinction between the system
of values per se and the same values as they relate to time. The
opposition between the two viewpoints, the synchronic and the
diachronic, is absolute and allows no compromise. (Saussure
1915, pp. 80,83)
The point, which Saussure himself made quite clear (p. 79), is that economics, especially neoclassical and Austrian economics, is synchronic.
It fits his recommendation for a fresh organization of the linguistic sciences so closely that the economics of Menger and Jevons and Walras
looks like his model. Both neoclassical economics and synchronic linguistics are theories of value-theories of psychological attitudes attached to things (whether lexical or woolen things, whether chaud the
word or sweater / pullover the object). In such an economics, as in such
a linguistics, the exact matching of material and person does not matter. It does not matter that a particular grain of wheat from the New Jersey farm of Patty Hersh finds its way to the dinner table of David Mitch
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The Literary Character of Economic Science
same purposive sense that characterizes each one of such acts (just as
the movement of the stock market in its totality is not 'personal' in the
sense of the myriad decisions made by each of the variously minded
traders)"-an economist hearing all this would think herself in the presence of an Austrian economist: Hayek, perhaps, or von Mises, or some
approximation sui generis such as Frank Knight. But she would in fact be
in the presence of the doyen of American literary critics, Kenneth Burke
(I968, p. 447). The parallels between Burke's thinking and Austrian economics are notable, the more so because their politics otherwise do not
match. (There do not seem to be any channels of mutual influence.)
The places where literature and economics overlap are not otherwise
much explored. A pioneer from the literary side is Kurt Heinzelmann
in The Economics of the Imagination (1980), which discusses at length how
economic theory in the nineteenth century used language and how it,
in turn, influenced the language of imaginative writers. Marc Shell has
catalogued the use of (strictly) monetary metaphors in literature in his
The Economy of Literature (1978). You can think of the possibilities.
Here's an instance. Both economists and literary critics talk about
"preferences." Economists mean by this, of course, simply "what people
want," in the sense of wanting some candy when the price is right. With
a few other economists, Albert Hirschman has observed that stopping
at mere wants causes economists to overlook higher-level preferences,
wants about wants (1984, pp. 89f.). Elsewhere these are known as taste,
morality, or (west of the Sierras) lifestyle. Hirschman's notion is that if
you wish to be the sort of person who enjoys Shakespeare, you will sit
through a performance of Two Gentleman of Verona as part of your education. You impose a set of preferences on yourself, which you then indulge in the usual way. You have preferences about preferences: metapreferences (d. Elster 1979).
It would not be shocking if literary critics could teach economists a
thing or two about meta preferences. Literary criticism, after all, is largely
a discourse about them, and people like I. A. Richards, Northrop Frye,
Wayne Booth, and Kenneth Burke are canny. You might think that the
older line of critics-Sir Phillip Sydney, Johnson, Coleridge, Arnoldwould have in fact the most to teach, being more concerned than the recent kind with matters of value (matters of how well, as against simply
how). A passage from the younger line, though, can illustrate how literary notions might be used to understand the economy of taste.
Richards wrote in 1925:
On a pleasure theory of value [that is to say, a theory using only
preferences, not metapreferencesl there might well be doubt [that
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FIGURES OF
ECONOMIC SPEECH
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37
38
39
Figures of Economic Speech
tion too: it is no more dubious that it knows one than the other." The argument, usually inexplicit though signaled by such a phrase as "it is natural to assume," is characteristic of philosophical discourse (Passmore
1961; Warner 1989). It is analogous to symmetry as a criterion of plausibility and comes up in many forums. A labor economist tells a seminar
about compensating differentials for the risk of unemployment, referring only to the utility functions of the workers. An auditor remarks that
the value of unemployment on the demand side (that is, the value to the
firm) is not included. The remark is felt to be powerful, and a long discussion ensues of how the demand side might alter the conclusions. The
argument from "the other side is empty'~which is to say, an appeal to
theoretical tidiness and symmetry is persuasive in economics. But economists are unaware of how persuasive it is.
Some of the rhetoric is aware of itself. Seminar audiences condemn
"ad hoccery." An economist will cheerfully admit to having bad data if
only she "has a theory" for the inclusion of such and such a variable in
her regressions. "Having a theory" is not so open and shut as it might
seem, depending, for instance, on what reasoning is prestigious at the
moment. Anyone who before 1962 threw accumulated past output into
an equation explaining productivity change would have been accused
of ad hoccery. But after Arrow's essay "The Economics of Learning by
Doing" (which, as it happened, had little connection with maximizing
behavior or other higher-order hypotheses in economics), there was
suddenly a warrant for doing it.
Economists are not completely aware of their rhetoric when they come
to simulation. They will commonly make an argument for the importance of this or that variable by showing its potency in a model with
back-of-the-envelope estimates of the parameters. In macroeconomics
a spectacularly fine example is Cochrane (1989). In historical economics it is common. Common though it is, little writing is devoted to its explication (but see Zeckhauser and Stokey 1978). Students learn simulation entirely by studying examples of it, and by studying the examples
without being told what they are examples of. The accidental teaching
contrasts with the self-conscious way in which econometrics and theory are taught. Economists have developed few rhetorical standards for
assessing simulation. Between A. C. Harberger's modest little triangles
of distortion and Jeffrey Williamson's immense multiequation models
of the American or Japanese economics is a broad range. Economists
have no vocabulary for criticizing any part of the range. They can deliver summary grunts of belief or disbelief but find it difficult to articulate their reasons in a disciplined way.
40
Figures of Economic Speech
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42
43
44
Figures of Economic Speech
va need training in mathematics and statistics stumbling into Econometrica would be astonished at the metaphors surrounding her, lost in a
land of allegory.
Allegory is long-winded metaphor (really, a combining of metaphor
and story), and all such figures are analogies. Analogies can be arrayed
in terms of explicitness, with simile ("as if") the most explicit and symbol ("the demand curve") the least explicit; and they can be arrayed by
extent, from analogy to allegory. Economists, especially theorists, frequently spin "parables" or tell "stories." The word "story" has, as I've
noted, come to have a technical meaning in mathematical economics. It
is an allegory, shading into extended symbolism. A tale of market days,
traders with bins of shmoos, and customers with costs of travel between bins illuminates, say, a fixed point theorem. "Tales well told endure forever," as an economist and poet named Robert Higgs put it.
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47
Figures of Economic Speech
we might be inclined to accept its touch without protest; the contradictions of capitalism are so very portentous, so scientifically precise, that
we might be inclined to accept their existence without inquiry.
But even metaphors of the middling sort carry freight. The metaphors of economics often carry in particular the authority of Science
and often carry, too, its claims to ethical neutrality. It's no use complaining that we didn't mean to introduce moral premises. We do. "Marginal productivity" is a fine, round phrase, a precise mathematical
metaphor that encapsulates a powerful piece of social description. Yet
it brings with it an air of having solved the moral problem of distribution facing a society in which people cooperate to produce things together instead of producing things alone. It is irritating that it carries
this message, because it may be far from the purpose of the economist
who uses it to show approval for the distribution arising from competition. It is better to admit that metaphors in economics can contain
such a political message than to use the jargon as an innocent.
A metaphor, finally, emphasizes certain respects in which the subject
is to be compared with the modifier; in particular, it leaves out the other
respects. Max Black, speaking of the metaphor "men are wolves," notes
that "any human traits that can without undue strain be talked about in
'wolf-language' will be rendered prominent, and any that cannot will
be pushed into the background" (1962b, p. 41). Economists will recognize this as the source of the annoying complaints from nonmathematical economists that mathematics "leaves out" some feature of the truth
or from noneconomists that economics itself "leaves out" some feature
of the truth. Such complaints are often trite and ill-informed. The usual
responses to them, however, are hardly less so. The response that the
metaphor leaves out things in order to simplify the story only temporarily is disingenuous, occurring as it often does in contexts where
the economists is simultaneously fitting fifty other equations. The response that the metaphor will be "tested" eventually by the facts is a
stirring promise, seldom fulfilled.
A better response would be that we like the metaphor of, say, the selfishly economic man as calculating machine because of its prominence
in earlier economic poetry or because of its greater congruence with introspection than alternative metaphors (of men as religious dervishes,
say, or as sober citizens). In The New Rhetoric (1958, p. 390), Perelman
and Olbrechts-Tyteca note that "the acceptance of an analogy . . . is
often equivalent to a judgment as to the importance of the characteristics that the analogy brings to the fore." What is remarkable about this
unremarkable assertion is that it occurs in a discussion of purely literary matters but fits easily into economic science.
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Figures of Economic Speech
Economists and other scientists are less isolated from the civilization
than you might think. Their modes of argument and the sources of their
conviction-for instance, their uses of metaphor-are not very different from Cicero's speeches or Hardy'S novels. This is a good thing. As
Black wrote (1962b, p. 243), discussing "archetypes" as extended metaphors in science, "When the understanding of scientific models and archetypes comes to be regarded as a reputable part of scientific culture,
the gap between the sciences and the humanities will have been partly
filled."
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25
22
28
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30
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24
24
25
30
19
14
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25
17
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51
5
3
2
2
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9
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10
1975
1976
1977
1978
1979
1980
1981
1982
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The Rhetoric of Scientism
trimmed the growth of money after a long period of inflation! Gosh!"
[Faints.] It would be easy to manipulate such a dunce, from which grew
the conviction in the 1940s and 1950s that it was easy to manipulate the
economy-to "fine-tune" it, as the journalists said. The models of rational expectations in the 1970s went to the opposite extreme. They
viewed the economic actor as a man of the world: "Oh, yes, a tax cut."
[Yawns, lights cigarette in a golden holder.] "Hmm: I see that inflation
has been going on for some months." [Settles into club chair.] '1\bout
time for the Fed to do its tight money act." [Calls broker, sips scotch,
dozes off under his copy of Barron's.]
Translation:
[BI I should like to suggest that expectations, since they are informed
predictions of future events, are essentially the same as the predictions
of the relevant economic theory. At
the risk of confusing this purely de-
The guesses people make are probably no better or worse than the
guesses economists would make. I'll
call such guesses "rational," to distinguish them from the irrationalthat is, unreasonable, foolish-
55
In other words, I'm saying that people take appropriate care with their
guesses, and economists should
credit them with such caretaking. If
people take care in guessing, talk
about the future will be pointless:
people will have allowed for the
effects being talked about. For instance, declarations that prosperity
is just around the corner will have
no impact, unless the declarer really
does know something we all don't
know. Economists do know something, though not as much as their
present notions about guessing
imply: they know that a bunch of
guesses by individuals average out
over a large group to less quirky
guesses.
56
[F] It is rather surprising that expectations have not previously been regarded as rational dynamic models,
since rationality is assumed in all
other aspects of entrepreneurial behavior. From a purely theoretical
standpoint, there are good reasons
for assuming rationality. First, it is a
principle applicable to all dynamic
problems (if true). Expectations in
different markets and systems would
not have to be treated in completely
different ways. Second, if expectations were not moderately rational
there would be opportunities for
economists to make profits in commodity speculation, running a firm,
or selling the information to present
owners. Third, rationality is an assumption that can be modified. Systematic biases, incomplete or incorrect information, poor memory, etc.,
can be examined with analytical
methods based on rationality.
(p.550)
S7
Other writers have found that farmers do not expect prices to move
as much as the prices actually do
move, but that they at least predict
the right direction: the cobweb theorem says they would predict the
wrong direction.
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The Rhetoric of Scientism
ism" (1984, p. 15); and Edward Manier writes that "the early drafts of
the theory do not conform to the 'hypothetico-deductive model' of scientific explanation, although they indicate Darwin's intent to represent
his views as if they did conform to that model" (Campbell 1984, p. 77,
and p. 76, where Manier is quoted).
The style of Muth's article makes an ethical and emotional appeal, an
appeal to his character as a Scientist and to the self-image of his audience as fellow scientists. The word "I" occurs twice only (once in the selection), in keeping with the convention that kings, editors, people with
tapeworms, and honest-to-goodness scientists are permitted to use the
more dignified "we" instead. The style is often indirect in other ways,
as suits a Scientist (one can make insecure scientists still more insecure
by violating such stylistic conventions). Ten of the thirty sentences in
the selection have their main clauses in the passive voice. Amidst much
that is self-confident and even cocky there are soothing words of proper
scientific modesty: "as a first approximation" (A) the theory works; "I
would like to suggest" (B), not assert; "it is rather surprising" (F) that
the theory has been overlooked; "it often appears" (I) that behavior is
inconsistent with the alternative theories. And throughout the essay
the reader is treated to dollops of scientific vocabulary from the classical languages: "purely descriptive hypotheses," "observed phenomena," "objective probability distributions of outcomes," "analytical
methods," and the like. Northrop Frye observes that "much of the difficulty in a philosophical [and scientific] style is rhetorical in origin, resulting from a feeling that it is necessary to detach and isolate the intellect from the emotions" (1957, p. 330). He examines a characteristically
opaque sentence from James Mill, translates it in the style of the translation of Muth above, and wonders, as you do about Muth, "why, if
James Mill meant that, he could not have said it." The answer is that
"the style is motivated by a perverse, bristling intellectual honesty. He
will not condescend to employ any of the pretty arts of persuasion,
sugar-coated illustrations or emotionally-loaded terms; he will appeal
only to the cold logic of reason itself-reinforced, to be sure, by a peculiarly Victorian sense that the more difficult the style, the tougher the
moral and intellectual fibre one develops in wrestling with it" (p. 330).
On the page before he remarks, '~ll of these are clearly at least in part
endeavours to purify verbal communication of the emotional content of
rhetoric; all of them, however, impress the literary critic as being themselves rhetorical devices" (p. 329).
Well, of course. The form of Muth's article seeks to persuade. Not to
fool: to persuade. Put clearly or modestly or, above all, unscientifically,
it would not have been in the end a success as a scientific paper. If he
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The Rhetoric of Scientism
version of the nuclear winter. As a reviewer of a book on the subject
wrote, "The chief difficulty is in rendering it quantitative. We must
hope that someone will now produce a numerical simulation that extinguishes/perpetuates all the right species in all the right numbers"
(McCrea 1983). A related conversation has been taking place in astronomy since the early 1980s, using identical rhetorical devices. One astronomical argument, beginning with the observation that there are regular mass extinctions, is that the sun has a mate, a star called Nemesis,
whose orbit periodically disturbs the comet fields surrounding the sun,
causing comets to rain into the solar system. Or perhaps the disturbing
body is a Planet X:
Although the Planet X model also appears to explain the periodic
mass extinctions adequately, Mr. Whitmire says he does not
consider it to be better than the Nemesis model. Nemesis, he
noted, has so far withstood many detailed calculations. But if the
Planet X model can withstand similar calculations, "I think it will
be a better model than Nemesis" for two reasons, he added. The
most important reason, he said, is that the existence of Planet X
has long been postulated, so scientists "would not be inventing
anything new." The second reason is that the orbit of the planet
is closer to the sun than that proposed for Nemesis, which means
it would be much more likely to be stable. (Chronicle of Higher
Education, February 20,1985)
When the puzzle is solved, the scientific community applauds, but it is
not applauding an event in the hypothetico-deductive model of science. The situation is similar in economics and in Muth.
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The Rhetoric of Scientism
In Muth's case the understanding is that he is comparing information
about the future of hog prices with any other good that can be bought
and sold. If the analogy persuades, then you will believe that business
people buy information to the optimal extent-or at any rate to the extent of optimality that they exhibit in their other and more ordinary
purchases. Their purchases of trucking services or space in feedlots do
not leave any gaps between the cost of the last units of such things and
the marginal value in use. There is no waste, no misallocation. Nor,
Muth is saying, is there misallocation in purchasing information about
the future, which implies that there is no gap for mere economists to exploit. When business people have done their jobs, the future will in fact
bring what on average they had expected it would bring. The argument
does not "state that the predictions of entrepreneurs are perfect" (C).
They do not hit the bull's-eye every time. But at least their hits are distributed around the bull's-eye in such a way that no economist could
profitably advise them to aim higher in shooting (E, F near the middle).
His three further arguments "from a purely theoretical standpoint"
(F) are revealing. They are purely aesthetic, which is what economists
mean when they call an argument "theoretical." As I have noted, when
economists are asked why almost all of them believe in free trade, they
will say that it is a "theoretical" argument that persuades them. Further
inquiry will reveal that it is in fact a pretty diagram that persuades
them. Evidence that would persuade a consistent positivist is absent.
So here, which probably explains why Muth immediately turns on himself with the stern injunction to seek positive virtue and "explain observed phenomena."
The arguments are arguments from symmetry and suitability and
personal character, distant from the rules of modernism. His notion of
rational expectations would be a unified theory of expectations, Muth
argues, symmetrical in all its applications. The appeal is to a uniformity
in social nature-or, more accurately, to a desire to understand social
nature uniformly. He argues again that economists would be rich if
they were as smart as alternative theories posit (E again). The argument
is practically ad hominem and has the reflexive character that the Frankfurt School of philosophers associates with critical, as against scientific,
theories.
He argues finally that rational expectations can be conveniently
modified to fit the imperfections of the social world. Flexibility is frequently praised in scientific theories and of course should be. But flexibility is simply a promise that the theory will be able to evade crucial
tests, surviving unscathed from positivist tortures. Nothing could be
further from naIve falsification. All the arguments he uses are, as Muth
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The Rhetoric of Scientism
says, "good reasons"; but they do not fit with the narrowing epistemology that many scientists still believe.
Even when he has jerked himself back to "real tests," Muth cannot
follow the modernist line. His "observations" (H, I, J) are all reports of
other people's work, once removed from the virtue of primary experiment. They are, in fact, mainly attacks on the plausibility of one among
the infinite number of possible alternatives to rationality, not the full,
fair horse race among alternatives imagined in positivist folklore. The
Heady and Kaldor paper cited by Muth used self-reporting of expectations by the farmers themselves, which is forbidden in the economist's
version of positivist method. The regression coefficients discussed in
paragraph I are open to numerous objections, as Muth well understood.
And the observation in J that cycles in Hog prices are in fact much
longer than the gestation period of hogs (the gestation period is important to the other theories of expectation) is hardly decisive, as Muth
himself remarks: "Positive serial correlation of the exogenous disturbances" means that farmers may have a series of several bad years in a
row, lengthening the apparent cycle beyond the period it takes to raise
a hog. The rejection of the nonrational hog cycle may be merely apparent. The test Muth proposes, to put it technically, is underidentified.
To say that Muth's "observations" would not persuade consistent
modernists is not, however, to say that they do not persuade reasonable
economists. Economists cannot be consistent modernists and remain
reasonable. The persuasiveness of Muth's paper comes from the richness
and catholicity of its unofficial arguments, well beyond the official narrowness. Among economists an argument from axiomatic demonstration, statistical test (regression in particular), or appeal to the competitive model all have prestige. None is logically compelling, nor even
very persuasive by itself. You can object to each that garbage in implies
garbage out. Yet the most hostile economist, if properly socialized, will
want to yield to the form. She will be pleased by their success at a formallevel-"Gosh, what a clever argument that is: What a neat proof!
statistical test/appeal to the intellectual traditions of economics"even if she wants to disbelieve their substance.
To claim that Muth persuades by rhetorical means is not of course a
criticism. Quite the contrary: it is inevitable, and even good. Outside of
a rather small group of specialists in speech communication, theatre
arts, and related fields the study of the rhetoric of a text is usually a
preface to debunking it. There is a rhetoric of the analysis of rhetoric.
An outsider reading "Sweet Talk: The Moral Rhetoric Against Sugar"
by Elizabeth Walker Mechling and Jay Mechling, published in 1983 in the
Central States Speech Journal, aches for the demonstration that the dia-
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The Rhetoric of Scientism
and (4) "It is largely the product of direct deduction from an
established ecological principle."
Such justifications do not correspond to the simplistic notions
about scientific progress that are taught in most high schools and
advanced by most media. Stanley does not invoke proof by new
information obtained from rigorous experiment. His second criterion is a methodological presumption, the third a philosophical
preference, the fourth an application of prior theory. Only Stanley's first reason makes any reference to Precambrian facts, and it
merely makes the weak point that his theory "accounts" for what
is known (many other theories do the same). But creative thought
in science is exactly this-not a mechanical collection of facts and
induction of theories, but a complex process involving intuition,
bias, and insight from other fields. Science, at its best, interposes
human judgment and ingenuity upon all its proceedings. (Gould
1977, p. 125)
That the theory "accounts for what [few] facts we have" (as Stanley
put it, in the usual phrase) is exactly Muth's claim too, buttressed immediately-lest we pause too long over the paucity of these facts and become depressed-by appeals to the traditions of reasoning in the field
and the aesthetic pleasure of the simpler argument. It is not strange to
find evolution and economics using identical rhetorical devices, for
they are identical twins raised separately. In any case, Muth's and Stanley's theories are similar in the rhetorical appeals they make.
In pure mathematics the case is one described by Mark Steiner in 1975,
suggested in turn by George Polya's book on the rhetoric of number and
quantity, Induction and Analogy in Mathematics (1954). The great Swiss
mathematician Leonhard Euler wished to find a simple expression,
supposing one existed, for the infinite sum 1 + 1/4 + 1/9 + 1/16 + ... and
so forth forever, the sum of the reciprocals of successive squares of the
positive integers. To those unfamiliar with infinite sums, the logic of
which was not developed in full rigor until long after Euler wrote, there
is no obvious reason why the sum should exist (although a little calculation makes it very plausible that it does and is somewhere around
1.64). What Euler showed is typical of the rabbits that eighteenth-century mathematicians were always pulling out of hats: that the sum is
exactly (1t)2/6. To nonmathematicians it is astonishing that 1t turns up
so often in expressions apparently unrelated to circles.
The argument that Euler developed depended on many things,
among them, as Steiner puts it, precisely that "he knew that a constant
like 1t on the basis of past experience, was likely to show up in such a
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75
growth.
2. From the railroad, canal, and wagon rates for transportation, however, you can see that railroads were about half as costly as the alternatives and carried half the transport; further, transport is 10
percent of national income.
3. If Adam Smith is in heaven and all is right with the world, then a
50 percent cost saving times a 50 percent of transport times a 10
percent of national income equals 2.5 percent of national income,
no large factor.
The three-line proof of smallness (known to some economists as Harberger's Law) was crafted in virtually this form by Peter McClelland
(1975) to apply to the economic history of the Navigation Acts, and it
has become a cliometric routine. For example, Gary Hawke's replication
of Fogel's calculation for England and Wales in 1865 also gives the threeline proof (1970, p. 173).
Fishlow's book made effectively the same point, was better written
than Fogel's, used techniques of persuasion more familiar to historians,
and was reviewed more genially, yet was in the end less influential.
Fogel's novelty of argumentative form attracted the attention of the
young and the anger of the old. The attention and anger inspired methodological declarations and denunciations, and in 1993 the Nobel Prize.
Fogel's book is the archetype of "cliometrics." Through thirty years it
has worn well and still inspires imitators and respectful critics. It was
more than a methodological advance. The theme that one innovation
cannot explain much of economic growth has converted many from romanticism about the Iron Horse or the Big Steel Mill.
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The Problem of Audience in Historical Economics
of the book, and one difficult for much of his implied audience to
grasp. If any point warranted emphasis, this one-a fortiori-did.
The third and fourth paragraphs draw attention to the central
point by attacking its alternatives, that is to say, alternative definitions of what it might mean for railroads to have been "indispensable": the figure is apophasis, the orderly rejection of all the alternatives except one.
Repeatedly, he disparages opposing arguments (diasyrmus)-a
technique so obviously forensic that historians use it gingerly if at
all. Fogel, with other economists, has no such scruples. In the second half of the second paragraph, for instance, he is scandalized by
the lack of scientific evidence concerning the allegedly unique contribution of the railroad. You can see the indignation by examining
the words that impart it: "almost exclusively"; "systematic"; "virtually"; "questionable"; "rather than on demonstrated fact." In the
fourth paragraph (p. 11), again, he adopts an ironic tone to disparage the indispensability of block signals and track walkers, by reductio ad absurdum.
Repeatedly, he notes the absence of decisive evidence. He appeals
again to the ideally modernist historian/scientist, who does not
carry an umbrella without a scientifically certified prediction of
light rain. The "evidence" so often mentioned is quantitative. The
figure is therefore a modern one, little used in the nonquantitative
civilization that thought most carefully about the means of persuasion.
A derivative of the modernist enthusiasm for properly modernist
evidence is the figure in the third paragraph (pp. 10f.): "No evidence has been supplied. And it is doubtful such evidence can be
supplied" (note the parallel construction). This is one of the common topics of modern intellectual life, carrying conviction among
all who pretend to intellectuality. The example at the end of page 11
is simulation (a Fogelian favorite, occurring throughout, as at
pp. 23, 24, and 47), one of the special topics in economics and in
other quantitative subjects. These carry conviction only among
experts.
One can fit the argument of a paper like Muth's much less readily than
Fogel's into the classical categories. Muth, with most economists, seems
seldom able to carry a rhetorical turn to its conclusion. He says, "It is
rather surprising that X is so," but this promising beginning of a good
old-fashioned bout of ironic thaumasmus (expression of wonder), which
Fogel would have teased out to a paragraph, is immediately abandoned
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The Problem of Audience in Historical Economics
Fogel's use of such figures of speech and reasoning led many graduate students to take up careers of under- and overestimating things. The
usual rhetoric of history in such matters (and of economics, though less
prominently displayed) demands "accuracy." An estimate of the population of fifth-century Athens must be "accurate"; a description of the
American economy as competitive is to be judged for "accuracy." A
physicist would attest that the word is meaningless without bounds on
the error; and a literary critic would attest that the accuracy necessary
to the argument depends on the conversational context. There is no absolute sense of "accuracy," as Oskar Morgenstern once argued to economists in a neglected classic drawing on the rhetoric of applied mathematics, On the Accuracy of Economic Observations (1963).
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Fogel would seem to require two implied readers, both close to contradictions in terms, the historically interested economist and the economically sophisticated historian. Fields under dispute between two
methods, as American economic history was during the 1960s, cannot
have one reader. Yet much writing, Fogel's included, presupposes one
alone, able to appreciate every nuanced remark about fixed capital!
output ratios or the wisdom of the Joint Traffic Association, Proceedings
of the Board of Managers, 1896. At the time Fogel wrote there were few actual readers who could take on the role of his ideal implied reader.
But the excellence of his work, and the work of other pioneers, created in time actual ideal readers for Fogel's books, the cliometric move-
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The Problem of Audience in Historical Economics
ment. Fogel was an orator setting up his soapbox in Hyde Park, gathering after a while a crowd capable of appreciating his speech. This is
how scholarly discourse changes: the crowd gathers bit by bit around a
different orator with a different implied audience. The audience is not
so much selected as trained, trained by repeated attempts to imagine itself as the implied reader. Something of the sort seems to have occurred
in modern mathematics. Hilbert's program of formal rigor has been
pushed so far that some present-day mathematicians only understand
formal rigor of a Hilbertian sort. An audience of such mathematicians
is merely puzzled, even confused, by attempts to give physical or other
motivation to mathematical argument. An audience deaf to certain
forms of talk has been assembled.
Fogel created an implied reader more definite than merely a generalized historical economist. His reader is an earnest fellow, much impressed by science, in love with figures and the bottom line, a little
stubborn in his convictions but open to argument and patient with its
details. Such an implied reader is less attractive than the more common
one in successful academic prose. Albert Fishlow's book, by contrast,
creates an implied reader more distant and disengaged, one sensitive to
ironies, amused by verbal rotundities, impatient with closely argued
economics but very patient indeed with narrative indirection. It is
something like the implied reader of the best history.
Fogel, though well aware that to the right audience his point could be
made in three lines, felt it necessary to write nine thousand more. The
three-line proof draws on all the peculiarities of the implied reader of
modern economics. It translates a literary remark about the indispensability of railroads into algebra, then draws on the logic of markets to
make the simplest available inference. Fogel gives it on page 11, repeating it in a slightly different form on pages 23 (where he states the opposite case the better to knock it down: exadversio) and 24. But it could
not persuade the reader Fogel wished to create, and whom by his eloquence he did in time create.
Fogel, then, accomplished a good deal with his rhetoric. Style, the
genre, the audience, are not "mere matters of form." Hayden White remarks that "the link between a given historian and his potential public
is forged on the pretheoretical, and specifically linguistic, level of consciousness" (1973, p. 429). Amelie Oksenberg Rorty again said it well.
In economic scholarship, as in philosophical scholarship, it is a good
part (not all) of the substance:
Conviction is often carried by a charismatic, authoritative style:
its clarity and condensation, the rhythms of its sentences, and
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The Problem of Audience in Historical Economics
its explosive imagery. But often the form of a work assures its
legitimation: a dedication indicating continuity of descent, a nihil
obstat, the laying on of hands by footnotes acknowledging the
advice of established authorities, the imprimatur of publication
by a major university press. The apparatus of footnotes,
appendixes, graphs, diagrams, formulas, used with measure
and discretion, indicate a proper sobriety. Sobriety, attention to
detail, care without obsession, the right balance of generality
and attention, an easy rather than a relentless use of imagery
and metaphor-these are integral to philosophical legitimation.
(Rorty 1983, p. 546)
Fogel was doing more than working within an existing scholarly genre
and existing audiences. He made new ones.
William Robinson remarked long ago, in Forensic Oratory: A Manual for
Advocates: "Every oration is in reality a dialogue, in which the doubts
and objections of the auditor are so many silent interrogatories to
which the orator audibly replies" (1893, p. 29). It is sometimes a new
style of conversation, a new way of speaking. Fogel (to use a distinction
drawn by Roland Barthes) was an author rather than a writer, a creator
of a new genre, a Max Planck or a Gerard Manley Hopkins, an author
of a new way of conversing rather than a user of a preexisting genre.
Even the science of the counting house and the railroad station draws
on the rhetoric of poets and mathematicians.
88
89
The Lawyerly Rhetoric of Coase's "The Nature of the Firm"
to be larger: (a.) the less the costs of organzing" and so forth. The "other
things being equal," "therefore," and "tend" are careful and conventional boilerplate in the contract between reader and economic Scientist. When claiming the ethos of Scientist the young Coase was especially fond of "tend to," the phrase becoming virtual anaphora on p. 46
(Coase 1937), repeated in all six of the complete sentences on the page
and once in the footnotes.
Such a treatise-rhetoric was popular in economics at the time. Likewise Coase indulged in outlining, anticipation, and summary, the curse
of modern prose, borrowed from the Germanic textbooks of an earlier
age: phrases like "The point has been made in the previous paragraph"
(Coase 1937, p. 44); "The problem which has been investigated in the previous section" (p. 47); "This point is further discussed below" (p. SIn.
41); and "The factors mentioned above" (p. 53) litter the essay. Economics had developed a rhetoric of close outlining, treatise-like, the better to
win the victory on the blackboard, which may be seen in works like Marshall's Principles (1920) or in its most tedious form in Irving Fisher's The
Theory of Interest (1930): "First Summary," "Introduction," "The Theory
in Words," "The Theory in Mathematics," "Further Discussion," "Second Summary," "The Theory in Words," "The Theory in Mathematics,"
... "First Approximation in Geometric Terms," "Second Approximation in Geometric Terms," "Third Approximation," and so forth (Fisher
1930, pp. xiii-xiv). Economists regard Fisher's great but unreadable
book as a masterpiece of exposition, which is a measure of the discipline's understanding of exposition.
90
One lawyerly feature of his rhetoric, for example, is its disputatiousness. Coase repeatedly and firmly rejects this or that line of argument,
after thorough enumeration of the possibilities (called dialiage in Greek
rhetoric), as when he turns back the claims of Frank Knight (an economist similar to Coase in many ways), "But those [like Knight] ... would
appear to be introducing a point which is irrelevant to the problem"
(Coase 1937, pp. 40-41). Or, "The reason given by [the Marxist] Maurice
Dobb is therefore inadmissable" (p. 47). The essay is filled with such
sharp disputation, usually with a name attached: "This is surely incorrect" (p. 50); '1\ustin Robinson's conclusion ... would appear to be definitely wrong" (p. SIn. 44); and so forth. The definiteness cannot have
endeared the young man to the establishment in British economics,
skewered thus in lawyerly cross-examination.
The adversarial rhetoric shows in the details, such as Coase's fondness
for starting sentences with "But." "But ... why is such organization necessary?" (p. 35); "But this is clearly not true in the real world" (p. 38n.
18); "But he does not develop the idea" (p. 39n. 19); "But it is difficult
to believe that it is measures such as those ... which have brought firms
into existence" (p. 41). Three more times on p. 44, twice on p. 50 contradicting Knight, twice in the paragraph beginning at the bottom of p. 51
contradicting Kaldor, Austin Robinson, and Joan Robinson. It shows
too in the overuse of "not only ... but" (an ornament of Latin origin,
though Coase disclaims Latin: "non solum . .. sed etiam"), as twice in the
first paragraph.
Another lawyerly habit is Coase's frequent appeals to political relevance, against the academic rhetoric by then typical of economics. In
this he was not unusual. The waste of the 1930s had made many economists, and even many poets, politically alert. The alternative of socialism was always on their minds: the puzzle of planning can "be
summed up in one word, Russia" (1988b, p. 8). Thus, "Those who object to economic planning on the grounds that the problem is solved by
price movements can be answered by pointing out that there is planning within our economic system which is quite different from the individual planning mentioned above [by which he means 'individuals
. . . exercise foresight and choose between alternatives' (p. 34)], and
which is akin to what is normally called economic planning" (Coase
1937, p. 35).
Coase is an attorney of economics in the arrangement, too. He follows the model of forensic speech, the six parts of a classical oration (for
which see Lanham 1991, p. 171). The exordium catches the reader's at-
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
Even in the most narrowly technical matters economists have shared convictions about what makes an argument strong,
convictions which they have not examined, which they can communicate to graduate students only tacitly, and which contain embarrassments to the official rhetoric.
101
The Unexamined Rhetoric of Economic Quantification
asked. On the issue of how much better black children do in nonsegregated schools, for example, Robert Crain of the Johns Hopkins Center
for Social Organization of Schools remarks that "there is a great deal of
debate about when improvement is a big deal and when it isn't a big
deal." Complaining that social scientists have been trained to think in
terms of merely statistical significance, he notes that they "have never
arrived at a consensus on how big a number is big" (1984, p. 12). The
same point can be made about the collateral controversy over race and
I.Q. revived again in the debate over The Bell Curve. The technical issue
is whether or not the averages of white and and black I.Q.s are different
statistically. I.Q. is a questionable notion to begin with and hard to measure free of cultural bias. The point I am making here, however, observes that the distributions of black and white I.Q.s largely overlap. An
alleged difference in averages, however certified by the standard of
merely statistical significance, might not therefore be a Big Deal. It has
no practical use. On the basis of a statistically significant difference between the races in average I.Q., for instance, you would hardly propose
to use race as a criterion for excluding certain children from certain
schools. Under such a policy, even accepting its repulsive moral base,
most of the students would be placed in the wrong school. Statistically
significant or not, the difference is too small to matter.
The point comes up repeatedly in statistical thinking. The rhetorically
savvy scientist asks every time, "So what?" "How large is large?" "What
does it matter for the intellectual or political or moral issue at hand?"
Much of economics turns on quarrels of characterization: Is America
monopolistic? Were medieval peasants selfish? Is the market for goods
worldwide? Is capitalism stable? These are quantitative questions, all
depending on answers to the question "How large is large?" That the
quarrels of characterization go on and on, passing from one century to
the next unanswered, suggests that the rhetoric has failed. No one answers the question "How large is large?" Everyone knows it has to be
asked, but no one answers it.
The last step of most calculations in economics or history therefore is
sleight of hand, the more convincing because the magician performs it
so absent-mindedly: "The coefficient in a regression of domestic prices
on foreign prices is statistically insignificantly different from 1.00, and
therefore purchasing power parity is true." "The number of formal whippings of slaves was less than 0.7 [or perhaps 1.2] a year, and therefore the
lash was insignificant [or perhaps significant]."
A typical case is the economics of market integration. For decades
certain economists have been measuring the correlation between two
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
The Unexamined Rhetoric of Economic Quantification
Kravis and Lipsey, to be quite fair, are unusually sensitive to the desirability of having some standard, more sensitive than are most economists working the field. They return repeatedly to the question of a
standard, though without resolving it. It reminds you of the linguists
grasping for a standard for "a language." They reject in one unpersuasive sentence on page 204 the only standard proposed in the literature
so far, the Genberg-Zecher criterion described earlier.
They are left, like most economists, with a senseless rhetoric of quantification: the "statistical test of significance." It is the consequence of
not asking "How Large is Large?" Something has gone very wrong
with the quantitative rhetoric of economics.
THE RHETORIC OF
SIGNIFICANCE TESTS
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
1. Does the paper use a small number of observations, such that statistically
significant differences are not found at the conventional levels merely by
choosing a large number of observations? The power of a test is high if
the significance level at N = 30,000 is carried over from situations
in which the sample is 30 or 300. For example in Glen C. Blomquist,
Mark C. Berger, and John P. Hoehn, N = 34,414 housing units and
46,004 individuals (March 1988, p. 93). At such large sample sizes
the authors need to pay attention to the trade-off between power
and the size of the test, and to the economic significance of the
power against alternatives.
2. Are the units and descriptive statistics for all regression variables included? Empirical work in economics is measurement. It is elementary to include units of the variables, and then also to give means.
3. Are coefficients reported in elasticity form, or in some interpretable form
relevant for the problem at hand and consistent with economic theory, so
that readers can discern the economic impact of regressors? Wallis and
Roberts long ago complained that "sometimes authors are so intrigued by tests of significance that they fail even to state the actual amount of the effect, much less to appraise its practical importance" (1956, p. 409). In some fields (not much in economics,
though we did find one example) the investigator will publish tables that consist only of asterisks indicating levels of significance.
4. Are the proper null hypotheses specified? The most common problem
would be to test against a null of zero when some other null is to
the point. Such an error would be the result of allowing a canned
program to make scientific decisions. If a null hypothesis is ~1 + ~2
= 1, there is not much to be gained from testing the hypothesis that
each coefficient is statistically significantly different from zero.
The most fruitful application of the Neyman-Pearson test specifies
the null hypothesis as something the researcher believes to be
126
5.
6.
8.
9.
true. The only result that leads to a definitive conclusion is a rejection of the null hypothesis. Failing to reject does not of course
imply that the null is therefore true. And rejecting the null does
not imply that the alternative hypothesis is true: there may be
other alternatives (a range that investigators agree is relevant, for
example) which would cause rejection of the null. The rhetoric of
rejection promotes a lexicographic procedure of "regress height,
income, country, age"; inspect t-values; discard as unimportant if
t < 2; circulate as important if t > 2.
Are coefficients carefully interpreted? Goldberger has an illustration
of this similar to many issues in economic policy (1991). Suppose
the dependent variable is "weight in pounds," the large coefficient
is on "height," the smaller coefficient is on "exercise," and the estimated coefficients have the same standard errors. Neither the
physician nor the patient would profit from an analysis that says
height is "more important" (its coefficient being more standard errors away from zero in this sample), offering the overweight patient
in effect the advice that he's not too fat, merely too short for his
weight. "The moral of this example is that statistical measures of
'importance' are a diversion from the proper target of researchestimation of relevant parameters-to the task of 'explaining variation' in the dependent variable" (p. 241).
Does the paper eschew reporting all t- or F-statistics or standard errors,
regardless of whether a significance test is appropriate? Statistical computing software routinely provide t-statistics for every estimated
coefficient. But the fact that programs provide them does not mean
that the information is relevant for science. We suspect that referees enforce the proliferation of meaningless t- and F-statistics, out
of the belief that statistical and substantive significance are the
same.
Is statistical significance at the first use, commonly the scientific crescendo of the paper, the only criterion of "importance"? By "crescendo"
we mean that place in the paper where the author comes to what
she evidently considers the crucial test.
Does the paper mention the power of the tests? For example, Frederic S.
Mishkin does, unusually, in two footnotes (June 1981, pp. 298n. 11,
305n. 27; lack of power is a persistent difficulty in capital-market
studies, but is seldom faced). As DeGroot pointed out, the power
of a test may be low against a nearby and substantively significant
alternative. On the other hand, power may be high against a
nearby and trivial alternative.
If the paper mentions power, does it do anything about it? It is true that
127
10. Does the paper eschew "asterisk econometrics," that is, ranking the coefficients according to the absolute size of t-statistics?
11. Does the paper eschew "sign econometrics," that is, remarking on the
sign but not the size of the coefficients? There is a little statistical theory in the econometrics books lying behind this customary practice (Goldberger 1991, ch. 22), though for the most part the custom outstrips the theory. But sign is not economically significant
unless the magnitude is large enough to matter. Statistical significance does not tell whether the size is large enough to matter.
It is not true, as custom seems to be arguing, that sign is a statistic independent of magnitude.
12. Does the paper discuss the size of the coefficients? That is, once regression results are presented, does the paper make the point that
some of the coefficients and their variables are economically influential, while others are not? Blomquist, Berger, and Hoehn do in
part, by giving their coefficients on housing and neighborhood
amenities in dollar form. But they do not discuss whether the
magnitudes are scientifically reasonable, or in some other way
important. Contrast Christina Romer, in a nineteen-page exclusively empirical paper: "Indeed, correcting for inventory movements reduces the discrepancy ... by approximately half. This
suggests that inventory movements are [economically] important" (June 1986, p. 327). M. Boissiere, J. B. Knight, and R. H. Sabot
reflect the more typical practice: "In both countries, cognitive
achievement bears a highly significant relationship to educationallevel. ... In Kenya, secondary education raises H by 11.75
points, or by 35 percent of the mean" (December 1985, p. 1026).
They make ambiguous use of the word "significance," then draw
back to the relevant question of economic significance. Later in
the paragraph they return to depending on statistical significance alone: "significantly positive" and "almost significantly
positive" become again their only criteria of importance.
Daniel Hamermesh, by contrast, estimates his crucial parameter K, and at the first mention says, "The estimates of K are quite
large, implying that the firm varies employment only in response
to very large shocks. . .. Consider what an estimate this large
means" (September 1989, p. 683). The form is here close to ideal:
128
13.
14.
15.
16.
lZ
129
18. In the "conclusions" and "implications" sections, is statistical significance kept separate from economic, policy, and scientific significance? In
Boissiere, Knight, and Sabot (December 1985) the effect of ability
is isolated well, but the economic significance is not argued.
19. Does the paper avoid using the word "significance" in ambiguous ways,
meaning "statistically significant" in one sentence and "large enough
to matter for policy or science" in another? Thus Darby (June 1984):
"First we wish to test whether oil prices, price controls, or both
has a significant influence on productivity growth" (p. 310). The
meanings are merged.
130
Percent
Yes
182
181
4.4
8.3
179
13.2
12
181
16.7
28.0
182
29.7
181
30.1
178
182
32.4
40.7
180
181
41.2
44.5
181
46.7
182
47.3
173
66.5
180
68.1
182
74.7
182
80.2
182
85.7
180
97.3
Source for Tables 3-7: All full-length papers using regression analysis in the American
Economic Review, 1980-1989, excluding the Proceedings.
Notes: "Percent Yes" is the total number of Yes responses divided by the relevant number of papers (never exceeding 182). Some questions are not generally applicable to particular papers and some questions are not applicable because they are conditional on
the paper having a particular characteristic. Question 3, for example, was coded "not
applicable" for papers which exclusively use nonparametric statistics. Question 19 was
coded "not applicable" for papers that do not use the word "significance."
131
132
133
Multiple
Authors Papers
Single
Author Papers
42.2
53.4
68.8
79.2
76.7
84.1
7Z8
84.8
Note: "Percent Yes" is the total number of Yes responses divided by the relevant number of papers.
Table 5. Authors at Tier 1 Departments Do Better than Others in Many Categories Measured by Percent Yes
Survey Question
Tier 1
Departments
Other
Departments
91.3
83.9
8Z0
78.9
84.8
71.4
65.5
41.2
60.0
3Z5
52.4
3Z5
50.0
23.1
Notes: According to the most recent National Research Council assessment, the Tier 1
departments are Chicago, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale.
"Percent Yes" is the total number of Yes responses divided by the relevant number of
papers.
134
135
Table 6. If Only Statistical Significance Is Said to Be of Importance at Its First Use (Question 7). Then Many Other Inappropriate Decisions Are Made Measured by Percent Yes
Survey Question
If only statistical
significance is
important
If more than
statistical significance
is important
0
3.2
28.6
14.0
4.2
6.3
4.7
17.9
7.3
55.3
10.4
51.2
13.7
77.9
17.7
38.8
21.9
74.1
26.3
36.1
30.2
52.3
29.5
52.9
51.6
80.0
59.0
77.7
66.7
83.7
66.7
96.5
86.5
84.8
94.7
100
Notes: "Percent Yes" is the total number of Yes responses divided by the relevant number of papers. Some questions are not generally applicable because they are conditional
on a paper having a particular characteristic. Question 3, for example, was coded "not
applicable" for papers which exclusively use nonparametirc statistics. Question 19 was
coded "not applicable" for papers that do not use the word "significance."
137
Date of Ph.D.
Conferral
1940-1969
1970-1974
1975-1979
1980-1984
61
37
29
45
Note: The number of papers published by each cohort is 31, 48, 24, and 24. Multiple
author papers were dated by the first name listed on the published article.
138
THE POVERTY OF
ECONOMIC MODERNISM
The Mathematization of
Economics Was a Good Idea
The economic conversation has heard much eloquent
talk, but its most eloquent passages have been mathematical. Especially
since the 1940s economists of all schools have become enchanted by the
new and scientific way of talking. Most journals of economics nowadays look like journals of applied mathematics or theoretical statistics.
The American Economic Review of the early 1930s, by contrast, contained
hardly an equation; assumptions were not formalized; the graphs were
plots of series, and not common; the fitting of a line to a scatter of points
was rare. The consequence of the primitive machinery for conversation
was an inability to speak clearly. Economists could not keep clear, for instance, the difference between the movement of an entire curve and
movement along a curve. Being mathematically innocent, they were unable to talk in curvy metaphors. They might think of the Labor Problem,
as Harry A. Millis did in his presidential address to the American Economic Association in December 1934, as having something to do with
marginal productivity (pp. 4-5). After reading J. R. Hicks's book of 1932,
The Theory of Wages, as Millis had without much mathematical understanding, they might recognize that marginal productivity did affect
wages. But the economists before the reception of mathematics fell
headlong, as Millis did, into confusions that a little mathematics would
have cleared up: confusions about working conditions (which they did
not see as merely another item with income in the utility function) or
about bargaining strength (which they did not see as determined by aggregated marginal productivities and supply curves of labor). Mathematical metaphors were not then available to most economists.
Now they are available in bulk, especially to the bourgeois, Englishspeaking economists who dominate the profession, and of whom I am an
example. Of the 159 full-length papers published in the American Economic
Review during 1981, 1982, and 1983, only 6 used words alone and only 4
139
140
141
142
143
144
7.
8.
9.
10.
And in addition the Golden Rule, Hume's Golden Fork: "When we run
over libraries persuaded of these principles, what havoc must we make?
If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics,
for instance, let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning
quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for
it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion" (Hume 1748, last
page).
It is at the level of applied, not theoretical, philosophy, among professional economists, not professional philosophers, that these commandments thrive. No more than a few philosophers now believe as
many as half of the commandments. A substantial, respectable, and
growing minority believes none of them. But all of them are believed by
a majority of economists (and psychologists, sociologists, political scientists, medical scientists, and other nonphilosophers enchanted by
modernism).
Certainly an earlier generation of economic methodologists believed
them. Methodology and its search for certitude has infected each school
of economics. In American economics, however, a methodology of
modernism and scientism is particularly associated with the Chicago
School. The main texts of economic modernism after Terence Hutchison's The Significance and Basic Postulates of Economic Theory (1938) are
Chicago School effusions, such as Gary Becker and George Stigler's
"De Gustibus Non Est Disputandum" (1977) or, above all, Milton
Friedman's "The Methodology of Positive Economics (1953). The more
extreme interpretations of the texts flourish among economists bearing
a Chicago degree.
145
II
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
10
FROM METHODOLOGY
TO RHETORIC
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
From Methodology to Rhetoric
maticians as much as of poets and novelists. It can be used as I have
shown for a literary criticism of science. The humanistic tradition in
Western civilization, in other words, can be used to understand the scientific tradition.
The literary, epistemological, and methodological strands of the new
rhetoric have not yet combined into one cord. They belong together, in
a study of how scholars speak, a rhetoric of inquiry. On the eve of the
Cartesian revolution the French philosopher and educational reformer
Peter Ramus (fl. 1550) brought to completion a medieval tendency to
relegate rhetoric to mere eloquence, leaving logic in charge of all reasons. In some of the textbooks that Descartes himself read as a boy the
merely probable argument was thus subordinated to the indubitable argument. Hostile to classical rhetoric, such a reorganization of the liberal
arts was well suited to the Cartesian program to put knowledge on
foundations built by philosophy and mathematics.
Although the best minds followed it, believing for little reason that
only mathematical argument was grounded, the program failed. Probable argument was in the meantime kept subordinate to certitude. Even
statistics, the science of uncertainty, sought indubitable foundations, resisting at various times the rhetoric of Bayes and Waldo In Rorty's words,
following Dewey, the search for the foundations of knowledge by
Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant, Russell, and Carnap was "the triumph
of the quest for certainty over the quest for wisdom" (Rorty 1979, p. 61;
d. Dewey 1929, pp. 33, 227). To reinstate rhetoric properly understood
is to reinstate wider and wiser reasoning.
165
166
167
11
ANTI-ANTI-RHETORIC
168
169
Anti-Anti-Rhetoric
cation, Imre Lakatos's Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes repeatedly tars Polanyi, Kuhn, and Feyerabend with "irrationalism" <e.g.,
Lakatos 1978, pp. 1:9n. 1, 76n. 6, 91n. 1, 130, and 130n. 3), emphasizing
their sometimes aggressively expressed case against rigid rationalism
and ignoring their moderately expressed case for wider rationality. The
tactic is an old one. Richard Rorty notes that "the charges of 'relativism'
and 'irrationalism' once leveled against Dewey [were] merely the
mindless defensive reflexes of the philosophical tradition which he attacked" (1979, p. 13; d. Rorty 1982, ch. 9). The brave resolve taken up by
the opponents of Dewey, Polanyi, Kuhn, and the rest is "if the choice is
between science and irrationality, I'm for science." But that's not the
choice.
Yet doubt still remains. If we agree that rhetoric of various sorts plays
a part in economic persuasion, and look on economic argument with a
literary eye, are we not abandoning science to its enemies? Will not scientific questions corne to be decided by politics or whim? Is not the routine of scientific methodology a wall against irrational and authoritarian threats to inquiry? Are not the barbarians at the gates?
The fear is a surprisingly old and persistent one. In classical times it
was part of the debate between philosophy and rhetoric, evident in the
unsympathetic way in which the Sophists are portrayed in Plato's dialogues. Cicero viewed himself as bringing the two together, disciplining rhetoric's tendency to become empty advocacy and trope on the one
hand and disciplining philosophy's tendency to become useless and inhuman speculation on the other. The classical problem was that rhetoric was a powerful device easily diverted to evil ends, the atomic
power of the classical world, and like atomic power, the subject of much
worrying about its proliferation.
The classical solution was to insist that the orator be good as well as
clever: Cato defined him as "vir bonus dicendi peritus," the good man
skilled at speaking, a Ciceronian ideal as well. Quintilian, a century
after Cicero, said that "he who would be an orator must not only seem
to be a good man, but cannot be an orator unless he is a good man" (De
Oratore 12.1.3). We are accustomed by modernist presuppositions to talk
of "good and bad rhetoric," contrasting Adlai Stevenson's splendid little jokes, say, with Joe McCarthy's vituperation. But it is people, not intellectual devices, that are good or bad. Good science demands good
scientists-that is to say, moral, honest, hard-working scientists-not
good methodologies. Rhetoric is merely a tool, no bad thing in itself. Or
rather, it is the box of tools for persuasion taken together, available to
persuaders good and bad. No surprise, then, that the classical world
170
Anti-Anti-Rhetoric
believed it took a "vir (mulierque) bonus" to use the tools right, just as cabala is not to be studied until those years of goodness beyond forty.
The classical worry about the power of rhetoric nonetheless looks
quaint to moderns, who know well enough that regressions, computers, experiments, or any of the now canonized methods of persuasion
can be used to deceive. The charge of deceit is commonly leveled at statistics, for instance, especially at the statistics most accessible to lay people, the statistical chart. It was a devil's invention of the late eighteenth
century. Edward Tufte notes that "for many people the first word that
comes to mind when they think about statistical charts is 'lie.' No doubt
some graphics do distort the underlying data. But data graphics are no
different from words in this regard, for any means of communication
can be used to deceive" (1983, p. 53). So said Aristotle:
And if it be objected that one who uses such power of speech
unjustly might do great harm, that is a charge which may be
made in common against all good things except virtue, and
above all against the things that are most useful. It is plain that
it is the function of one and the same art to discern the real and
the apparent means of persuasion, just as it is the function of
dialectic [that is, deductive, "compelling" reasoning] to discern
the real and the apparent syllogism. (Rhetoric 1.1.1355b.3.14)
There is nothing intrinsic in analogies, appeals to authority, arguments
from contraries, or other recognizable pieces of classical rhetoric that
make them more subject to evil misuse than the more obviously modern methods. You can only note with regret that the Greeks and Romans were more sensitive to the possibility of misuse and less hypnotized by the claims of method to moral neutrality.
The suspicion of rhetoric is as old as philosophy itself: we cannot use
mere plausibility because an eloquent speaker could fool us:
Socrates: And he who possesses the art [of rhetoric] can make the
same thing appear to the same people just, now unjust, at
will?
Phaedrus: To be sure.
(Phaedrus 261d)
We need something, it has been said, besides the mere social fact that
an argument proved persuasive.
To such an objection the answers, then, are two. Science and other
epistemologically pure methods can also be used to lie. Our defense
must be to discourage lying, not to discourage a certain class of talk. Secondly, talk against talk is self-refuting. The person making it appeals to
171
Anti-Anti-Rhetoric
172
Anti-Anti-Rhetoric
nation camps. Listen to Pearson in the neopositivist bible, The Grammar
of Science:
From a bad stock can come only bad offspring .... [H]is offspring
will still be born with the old taint .... What we need is a check
to the fertility of the inferior stocks, and this can only arise with
new social habits and new conceptions of the social and the
antisocial in conduct .... Now this conclusion of Weismann's
[Essays on Heredity and Kindred Biological Problems, trans. 1889]if it be valid, and all we can say at present is that the arguments
in favour of it are remarkably strong-radically affects our
judgment on the moral conduct of the individual, and on the
duties of the state and society towards their degenerate
members .... The "philosophical" method can never lead to a
real theory of morals. Strange as it may seem, the laboratory
experiments of a biologist may have greater weight than all
the theories of the state from Plato to Hegel! (Pearson 1900,
pp.26-28)
And later, "It is a false view of human solidarity, which regrets that a capable and stalwart race of white men should advocate replacing a darkskinned tribe which can neither utilise its land for the full benefit of
mankind nor contribute its quota to the common stock of human
knowledge" (p. 369). On grounds of cost and benefit he draws back a little from the implications: "This sentence must not be taken to justify a
brutalising destruction of human life .... The anti-social effects of such
a mode of accelerating the survival of the fittest may go far to destroy
the preponderating fitness of the survivor" (p. 369n). And yet-and
yet: '~t the same time, there is cause for human satisfaction in the replacement of the aborigines throughout America and Australia by
white races of far higher civilisation."
Stephen Jay Gould notes that Pearson's inaugural paper in his new
journal Annals of Eugenics (1925), an attack on Jewish migration to
Britain, met the highest scientific standards of the day, alas (Gould
1984, p. 296). Most scientists were racists, as were most other people before the end. The racist narrative was of course common among educated people from the 1880s to the 1940s. The economist Alfred Marshall, for example, explaining David Ricardo's method (so un-English
in its abstraction, thought Marshall, Ricardo's ancestors being Sephardic Jews), noted that "Nearly every branch of the Semitic race has
had some special genius for dealing with abstraction" (Marshall 1920,
p. 761n; Appendix B, p. 5).
Commonplace though they were, it is a mistake to think of such re-
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marks as unscientific or pseudoscientific, that is, as something we can
avoid merely by Being Scientific-factual or logical as against metaphorical and narrative. Karl Pearson and Alfred Marshall were among
the handful of leading scientists of their generation. Science does not
protect us from all nonsense, only some. Science is human speech, too.
If we do not realize that science uses metaphors and tells stories now as
it did in 1900 and 1938 we are going to do worse than make fools of ourselves. In 1933 the leading British journal of science, Nature, approved
of a new law which "will command the appreciative attention of all who
are interested in the controlled and deliberate improvement of human
stock" (Mackenzie 1981, p. 44). What new law? That just instituted by
the Nazis in Germany to sterilize those suffering from congenital feeblemindedness, manic depressive insanity, schizophrenia, hereditary
epilepsy, hereditary St. Vitus's dance, hereditary blindness and deafness, hereditary bodily malformation, and habitual alcoholism.
A day at Auschwitz does not put one in mind of the learned discourses of Hegel or Nietzsche, least of all the down-to-earth pragmatism of Dewey or James. It puts one in mind of factories and laboratories and record-keeping, the measuring of boiled skulls and the testing
of human tolerance for freezing water, positive science. I am not claiming that positivists are fascists or that science leads to totalitarianism
(the eugenists in Britain, for example, for the most part edged away
from Nazi racial theories in the 1930s; d. Mackenzie 1981, p. 45). I am
claiming merely that positivists or the other believers in a religion of
Science cannot in all fairness make such charges against everyone they
disagree with, as they have a notable tendency to do. It is their most
common rhetorical turn. The trick of charging that anyone who does
not agree with a particularly narrow version of French rationalism or
British empiricism is an "irrationalist" (Stove 1982) and is therefore in
cahoots with Hitler and Mussolini needs to be dropped: it sticks to the
bringers of the charge.
It has arisen again in the case of Paul de Man, a Belgian professor of
literature at Yale who annoyed cultural conservatives and was therefore vilified after his death by the many profound students of literature
at The New York Times. De Man in his youth had flirted briefly with fascist ideas of culture in a few newspaper columns among hundreds he
wrote at the height of Hitler's European prestige. The truth about
Nazism and the Holocaust is that they came from Western civilization,
from its best as from its worst, from academic positivism itself as much
as from Valley-Girl irrationalism (d. Bakan 1967, p. 166). The point is
one of the proper obsessions of the literary critic George Steiner. In Language and Silence he quotes a Jewish victim of the camps noting in won-
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der that the Germans were highly educated, a people of the book.
Steiner comments, "That the book might well be Goethe or Rilke remains a truth so vital yet outrageous that we try to spit it out" (1967,
p. 162). A startlingly high percentage of the officers in the SS had advanced degrees in the humanities. And it was not difficult to find doctors to run experiments in working people to death.
The same is true on the left, with the additional point that the theory
of Stalinism was literally old-style positivism, the centralizing rationalism of early nineteenth-century intellectuals, on which the mid-twentieth century paid the interest compounded. The positivists have long
been accustomed to shouting angrily that open discourse leads to totalitarianism. Perhaps their anger assuages a wordless guilt. Positivism
claims noisily to contribute to freedom, but tends to stride beyond freedom and dignity.
The methodological conservative believes that people will behave
frightfully badly if not tamed by a religious belief or a literary canon or
a scientific methodology. The notion has little to support it from intellectual history. Good and bad behavior have coexisted with loose and
rigid rules of methodology in various times from Abraham to Goebbels.
Richard Crosman, though using the word "anarchy" inexactly, attacks
in such terms E. D. Hirsch's defense of a conservative canon of literature: '~mazingly enough, all we need to do to rigorously disprove the
entire argument of Hirsch's book is to demonstrate that anarchy [by
which he means chaos] does not necessarily result from 'subjectivism'
and 'relativism (Crosman 1980, p. 159). You can doubt that Hirsch is
quite such a sitting duck as this, yet agree that the virtues of a methodology or a canon are doubtful.
Gerald Graff (1983, pp. 604f.) argues forcefully that literary theories
do not have specific "political implications." He wishes to "get beyond
the whole dubious project of attaching specific political implications to
theories independent of the way they operate in concrete social practice. A theory such as interpretive objectivism doesn't 'imply' any single politics. Making political judgments and classifications of theories
requires an adequate analysis of social practices. Is there any reason to
think current literary critics possess such an analysis?" Judging from
the level of political analysis in, say, Terry Eagleton's Literary Theory
(1983), you would have to answer, No.
In an essay called '~nti-Anti-Relativism" Clifford Geertz has argued
that the fear that chaos will come from abandoning rigid methodologies is unreasonable: "There may be some genuine nihilists out there,
along Rodeo Drive or around Times Square," he says, "but I doubt very
many have become such as a result of an excessive sensitivity to the
lll
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claims of other cultures. Anti-relativism has largely concocted the anxiety it lives from" (1984). And Richard Rorty says the same in his essay
"Relativism" (1984a). All of these literary and social scientific and
philosophic people are making the same point, an obvious one by now
but apparently still worth making: be of good cheer, for it is real politics, not professors' politics, that leads to chaos, or to the revolution.
An irrational fear that Western intellectual life is about to be overrun
by nihilists grips many people. It amounts to a reaction to the 1960s
among people like Daniel Bell, who are unaware or unimpressed that
the 1960s actually did liberate women and gays and blacks and others.
They are driven by their fear to the advocate Objectivity, Demarcation,
and other regimens said to be good for toughening, such as birching
and dips in the river on New Year's Day. They were not always so devoted to the strenuous life. The Second World War and the Cold War
helped do it. American historians in the 1940s and early 1950s, for instance, forswore their faith in relativism and took up an icy if unexamined Objectivity (Novick 1988). It was a premeditated act of ideology.
The war against fascist and communist dictatorships, they as much as
said, would be won or lost in the seminar room.
The point is that these political arguments against an openly rhetorical history or biology or economics are notably weak and unargued. The
alternative to blindered methodologies of modernism is not a mob warring against itself but a body of enlightened thinkers engaging in earnest
conversation in which they know what rhetorics they use. Perhaps the
thinkers would be more enlightened and more earnest when freed to
make arguments that actually bore on the scientific questions at issue.
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the idea has been expressed to me by many economists. It is beautifully
elaborated, and used as a tool for feminist thinking, by Julie Nelson
[1995].) The scientist's job is not to decide whether propositions are useful for understanding and for changing the world but to classify them
into one or the other half, scientific or nonscientific, and to bring as
many as possible into the scientific half.
scientific
fact
truth
objective
positive
rigorous
precise
things
cognition
hard
yang
male
The
Demarcation
Line
humanistic
value
opinion
subjective
normative
intuitive
vague
words
feeling
soft
yin
female
But why? What would be the point of such an exercise? Whole teams
of philosophical surveyors have sweated long over the placement of a
demarcation line between scientific and other propositions, worrying
for instance whether astrology can be demarcated from astronomy; it
was the chief activity of the positivist movement for a century. It is unclear why they troubled themselves. The trouble is considerable. Kepler,
for example, was a serious astrologer, Newton was a serious alchemist,
and many modern scientists take seriously the claims of the paranormal, which causes much trouble for a view a priori that the word "serious" cannot be spoken together with "astrology" and "alchemy" and
"paranormal."
We have fallen in love with the problem of finding out where God
drew the boundary dividing scientific from nonscientific thinking. But
there is no reason to believe that the term "scientific" occurred in God's
blueprint of the universe. People are persuaded of things in many ways,
as I've shown for economic persuasion in detail. It is not clear why they
should labor at drawing lines on mental maps between one way and
another.
Modernists have long faced the embarrassment that metaphor, case
study, upbringing, authority, introspection, simplicity, symmetry, fashion, theology, and politics apparently serve to persuade scientists as
well as they do other folk, and have dealt with the embarrassment by
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labeling these the "context of discovery." The way scientists discover
hypotheses has been held to be distinct from the "context of justification," namely, justifications of a modernist sort. Thomas Kuhn's autobiographical reflections on the matter can stand for the puzzlement in
recent years about this ploy: "Having been weaned intellectually on
these distinctions and others like them, I could scarcely be more aware
of their import and force. For many years I took them to be about the
nature of knowledge, and ... yet my attempts to apply them, even
grosso modo, to the actual situations in which knowledge is gained, accepted, and assimilated have made them seem extraordinarily problematic" (Kuhn 1970, p. 9).
The claim of the modernist methodologist is that "ultimately" all
knowledge in science can be brought into the hard, objective side of the
dichotomy. Consequently, in certifying propositions as really scientific
there is great emphasis placed on "conceivable falsification" and "some future test." The apparent standard is the modernist one that we must find
plausible only the things we cannot possibly doubt. Yet even this peculiar standard is not in fact applied: a conceivable but practically impossible test takes over the prestige of the real test, free of its labor.
The silent substitution of a conceivable test left to the future for a present test left undone needs to be challenged. You are not doing science
merely because you have promised ultimately to do it. The substitution
is identical to the step taken in the "new welfare economics" of the
1940s. Economists wished to equate as morally similar actual compensation of those hurt during a Pareto optimal move with a hypothetical
compensation not actually paid, as in the Hicks-Kaldor test. It was said
that if conceivably we could compensate unemployed auto workers out
of the gain from freer trade with Japan, then we should go ahead with
freer trade. We do not actually have to pay the compensation.
The point is that you can't tell whether an assertion is persuasive by
knowing from which side of the scientific/humanistic dichotomy it
came. You can tell whether it is persuasive only by thinking about it
and talking about it with other thoughtful people. Not all regression
analyses are more persuasive than all moral arguments; not all controlled experiments are more persuasive than all introspections. People
should not discriminate against propositions on the basis of epistemological origin. There are some subjective, soft, vague propositions that
are more persuasive than some objective, hard, precise propositions.
The economist is more persuaded that she will buy less oil when its
price doubles than that the age of the universe is sixteen billion years.
She might even be more persuaded of it than she is that the earth goes
around the sun. She has the astronomical facts only from the testimony
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of people she trusts, a reliable though not of course infallible source of
useful persuasions. The economic fact she has from looking into herself
and seeing it sitting there smiling out at her. As we have seen, it is not
because the law of demand has predicted well or has passed some statistical test that it is believed-although such further tests are not to be
scorned. The "scientific" character of the tests is irrelevant.
It may be claimed in reply, and often is, that people can agree on precisely what a regression coefficient means but cannot agree precisely on
the character of their introspection. This is false: people can converse on
the character of their introspections, and do so habitually-about their
aesthetic reactions, say, to a painting by Brueghel or a theory by Lucas.
The conversations often reach conclusions as precise as human talk can.
But even if it were true that regression is more precise, this would not be
a good argument for economists to abandon introspection in economics. Introspections, even if imprecise, can be better than regression estimates infected with misspecifications and errors in the variables. That
the regression uses numbers, precise as they look, is irrelevant. To
speak precisely, precision means low variance of estimation (and we
know what's wrong with that); but if the estimate is greatly biased, it
will tell precisely nothing.
Saying merely that an argument is "scientific" by some narrow canon
does not say much. We know that the stealing of strips of land and
sheaves of grain troubled the villager of medieval England. One way
we know it is the confession of Avarice in Piers Plowman:
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point. You are more strongly persuaded that it is wrong to murder than
that inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon. This
is not to say that similar techniques of persuasion will be applicable to
both propositions. It says merely that each within its field, and each
therefore subject to the methods of honest persuasion appropriate to
that field, the one achieves a greater certitude than the other.
To deny the comparison is to deny that reason and the partial certitude it can bring applies to nonscientific subjects, a common but unreasonable position. There is no reason why specifically "scientific"
persuasiveness (well, actually pseudoscientific: "at the .05 level the coefficient on M in a regression of prices of 30 countries over 30 years is
insignificantly different from 1.0") should take over the whole of persuasiveness, leaving moral persuasiveness incomparably inferior to it.
Arguments like "murder violates the reasonable moral premise that we
should not force other people to be means to our ends" or "from behind
a prenatal veil of ignorance of which side of the murderer's revolver we
would be after birth we would enact laws against murder" are persuasive in comparable units. Not always, but sometimes, they are more
persuasive, better, more probable (Toulmin 1958, p. 34). Frank Knight,
whose thinking is congenial to this rhetorical approach, made a similar
point in similar words (1940, p. 164). Of the basic postulates of economics, attested by "sympathetic introspection," he said, "We surely
'know' these propositions better, more confidently and certainly, than
we know the truth of any statement about any concrete physical fact or
event ... and fully as certainly as we know the truth of any axiom of
mathematics."
We believe and act on what persuades us-not what persuades a majority of a badly chosen jury, but what persuades well-educated participants in the conversations of our civilization and of our field. To attempt to go beyond persuasive reasoning is to let epistemology limit
reasonable persuasion.
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The strangeness is not that the scientists and scholars in fact pursue
Falsehood. They do not. They pursue other things, but things which
have only an incidental relation with Truth. They do so not because
they are inferior to philosophers in moral fiber but because they are
human. Truth-pursuing is a poor theory of human motivation and nonoperational as a moral imperative. The human scientists pursue persuasiveness, prettiness, the resolution of puzzlement, the conquest of
recalcitrant details, the feeling of a job well done, and the honor and income of office: as Nelson Goodman says, they pursue "varieties of
rightness other than truth" (1983, p. 105). It must be borne in mind that
it is only a philosophical doctrine that we pursue Truth.
The philosophical doctrine is not so decisively True, furthermore,
that it should be allowed to overwhelm our common sense in the matter of how much weight to place on rhetoric. The very idea of Truthwith a capital T, something beyond what is merely persuasive to all concerned-is a fifth wheel, inoperative except that it occasionally comes
loose and hits a bystander. If we decide that the quantity theory of
money or the marginal productivity theory of distribution is persuasive, interesting, useful, reasonable, appealing, acceptable, we do not
also need to know that it is True. Its persuasiveness, interest, usefulness,
and so forth come from particular arguments: "Marginal productivity
theory, for one thing, is a consequence of rationality in the hiring of inputs" (and we think highly of rationality). "The quantity equation, for
one thing, is a simple framework for macroeconomics" (and we think
highly of simplicity).
These are particular arguments, good or bad. After making them,
there is no point in asking a last, summarizing question: "Well, is it
True?" It's whatever it is-persuasive, interesting, useful, and so forth.
The particulars suggest answerable rhetorical questions that might matter, such as what exactly the use of the fact is or to whom exactly it is persuasive. There is no reason to search for a general quality called Truth,
which answers only the unanswerable question "What is it that is in the
mind of God?" Such and such and so and so accord with a human checklist of arguments persuasive to humans. That is all ye need to know.
The usual way of rebutting such an argument is to say that one must
have a theory of truth, an Epistemology. Recall the argument that one
must have a Methodology. How can you talk without one? (A light bulb
goes on in the mind of the speaker.) Indeed, talking against epistemology
is itself epistemological talk-talk about epistemology, which therefore
does exist. (People who think they have discovered a neat philosophical
argument favor italics.) Willard Quine calls the argument Plato's Beard,
in honor of the man who got most famously tangled in it: "Nonbeing
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must in some sense be [or, in the italic style, be], otherwise what is it [or
what is it] that there is not?" (Quine 1948, pp. 2f.). With it, he points out,
you can prove the existence of nonbeings such as Pegasus, pigs with
wings, and, here, epistemology: that is to say, the existence of an actual
referent for any reference in the language. The point is a reductio ad absurdum. And if the reduction were not considered absurd, it would still
not imply that serious people should spend much time thinking about
the referent in question. The serious issues are rhetorical-how we become persuaded, in the actual case at hand-not epistemological.
Epistemology, as we have seen, has had its uses, and many uplifting
sermons have been heard on pursuing Truth. They are more uplifting,
to be sure, when the threat to the values thus celebrated is genuine: the
preacher of the gospel facing death in the jungle looks more courageous
than the same man thundering in Wiltshire to a congregation of shepherds and military wives. The defenders of truth and rationality in the
West have a habit of using the rhetoric of danger without really facing it.
Listen to Lawrence Stone, that best of historians and worst of methodologists, issuing a call to arms from the letters column of Harper's:
"Today, we need to stand shoulder to shoulder against the growing
army of enemies of rationality. By that I mean the followers of the fashionable cult of absolute relativism, emerging from philosophy, linguistics, semiotics, and deconstructionism. These ... tend to deny the possibility of accurate communication by the use of language, the force of
logical deduction, and the very existence of truth and falsehood"
(Stone 1984, p. 5).
But the most serious minds doubt the very existence of Truth, capitalT, if it is construed as something standing there in the absolute, waiting
to be observed by the lone scientist or historian. Nelson Goodman, no
enemy of rationality, writes, "The scientist who supposes that he is singlemindedly dedicated to the search for truth deceives himself. He seeks
system, simplicity, scope; and when satisfied on these scores he tailors
truth to fit. He as much decrees and discovers the laws he sets forth, as
much designs and discerns the patterns he delineates" (1978, p. 18). Nor
was Frank Knight prone to semiological fevers. Yet in his review of
Hutchison's positivism in economics he declared, with many reasonable
people since Gorgias of Liontini: "Testing observations is chiefly ... a
social activity or phenomenon. This fact makes all knowledge of the
world of sense observation ... itself a social activity. A conscious, critical social consensus is of the essence of the idea of objectivity or truth"
(1940, p. 156). These sober people, and many more, agree that Truth is
a fifth wheel and persuasion social.
A specialization of the argument that we pursue Truth is that we pur-
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sue Logic. This, too, is questionable. In questioning it, again I do not
mean to imply that it would be better to become illogical. Formal logic
is fine, within its limits. What goes wrong is that formal logic is treated
sometimes as all of reason. The impulse to treat it this way shows up especially in lists of fallacies. Fallacy-mongering reveals a legislative attitude toward method. It is no surprise that Jeremy Bentham, confident
of his ability to legislate for others in matters of method as in matters of
education, prisons, and government, had compiled from his notes The
Book of Fallacies (1824). David Hackett Fischer's book Historians' Fallacies
(1970) has such a flaw: it takes as "fallacious" the many arguments that
may be merely supporting, if by themselves inconclusive.
Elementary texts on logic exhibit this older attitude, that a form of
words that cannot be fitted into a valid syllogism is to be judged fallacious-which is to say, bad argument. Irving Copi's fifth edition of his
Introduction to Logic (1978), for instance, praises Fischer's zeal in rooting
out fully 112 different forms of fallacious heresy in the works of historians, and then turns to attack as "fallacies" (pp. 87, 91) the argument
from authority, from the character of one's opponent, from equal ignorance, and many other arguments used daily by scientists, by historians, by judges (as Copi notes without realizing the significance), and,
most significant of all, by philosophers themselves. His Chapter 3, "Informal Fallacies," deals with such errors. A later chapter, '1malogyand
Probable Inference," is strictly segregated, as is customary in philosophical exposition, from reasoning that is properly syllogistic (and
therefore "demonstrative," "necessary," and so forth). There Copi admits charmingly that of course "most of our own everyday inferences
are by analogy," presumably also the philosopher's own. He does not
consider the possibility that his everyday deductions may also be analogies. L. Susan Stebbing's little book on logic, first published in 1943 and
reissued since to successive generations of British students of philosophy, takes an even firmer stand against arguments merely persuasive to
all concerned: "We can know our conclusions to be true only when we
know both that the premises are true and that they imply the conclusion. For this purpose we reason" (1943, p. 160). Observe the force of her
italics here, a bit of yelling in the cause of reason. She goes on to inveigh
against "the orator," whose aim, she believes, "is to induce belief at all
costs" and whose "appeal is not to reason but to uncontrolled emotion,
not to considerations logically relevant but to prejudice."
It is notable that these logicians, committed presumably to the serious study of reason, do not exhibit serious understanding of rhetoric
and its history. Copi sneers at rhetoric (pp. 75, 242), though he does
admit (p. 255) that there were "older times when logic and rhetoric were
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more closely connected than they are today." Stebbing is less tolerant,
though she first wrote in the decade in which rhetoric touched its nadir,
and may be excused for using a little uncontrolled emotion and prejudice in defense of even a narrow idea of reasoning.
It is less excusable, though, that in narrow terms the defenses of narrowness are circular (the fallacy petitio principii). The rhetorical device is
to use words like "true" or "correct" or "sound" or "what we know" (let
us abandon "valid" for whatever uses the logician wishes to put it) to
mean "obeying all the laws of a narrow logic as laid down by the local
fallacymongerer" (Stebbing 1943, p. 161; Copi 1978, p. 87). Since the conclusion has been assumed, by definition, it is no trick to reduce truth,
correctness, soundness, and what we know to formal logic of a syllogistic sort, casting out the rest as fallacy. This is the procedure in J. 1.
Mackie's article "Fallacies" in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (1967).
Here the deduction of "ought" from "is" is described flatly as "an error
exposed by Hume, but still frequently committed" (p. 178). In the past
few decades, for instance, it has been frequently committed by Willard
Quine, John Searle, J. 1. Austin, and other notorious advocates of fallacy. It has taken a long time for Cardinal Newman's reasoned complaint, written in 1841 (1870, p. 90), to become a common opinion
among philosophers themselves: "Logicians are more set on concluding rightly, than on right conclusions."
Anti-Modernism Is Nice
The larger issue reaches well beyond technical philosophy, and beyond the philosophical misapprehensions of economists.
The issue is modernism, economics being merely one field ready to shed
it. Modernism was worth trying. But it didn't work. For unpersuasive
reasons it has confined psychologists (until recently) to theories that do
not use the unconscious mind and has confined economists (until recently) to theories that do not use psychology. Perhaps it is time to stop.
An economist who thinks so, and wishes a broader and more cogent
conversation to begin in economics, does not have to join the antimodernists in everything they do. The antimodernists have been trying to
revive certain writers long neglected, especially in the English-speaking world, who would not have accepted the modernist/scientistic orthodoxy as defined around 1950. These include such betes noires as the
sophists, Cicero, scholastic philosophy, and Hegel. More recently they
include the American pragmatists, long out of philosophical fashion,
whose work was once viewed as an amusing but after all rather crude
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approximation to what was done properly in Vienna or Cambridge; of
whom you might say,
I write them out in a verse:
James and Dewey and Peirce.
Sweetness and light enough,
Mathematically not up to snuff.
The antimodernists themselves are as alarming as their heroes: they
have included Continental philosophers such as Heidegger, Habermas,
Adorno, Foucault, and other alarming people; certain unconventional
observers of science (Polanyi, Bronowski); renegade analytic philosophers such as Stephen Toulmin and Richard Rorty; social scientists
using nonquantitative methods (from Freud to Piaget and Fraser to
Geertz); sociologists, philosophers, and historians of science after
Thomas Kuhn; and, most alarming of all, literary critics in profusion.
An attack on the narrowness of modernist rhetoric in economics does
not depend on accepting such folk as allies. Richard Rorty has named
them "the new fuzzies" (1984a), a term of affection (for he is one), evoking Winnie ille Pu discoursing on philosophy. In our actual practice in
daily life and thought, though, we are all fuzzies, even we economists,
however glinty and Darth Vaderish we think we are made by mastery
of the identification problem and the Kuhn-Tucker conditions.
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the reasons that some methodology or epistemology or logic claims to
be stations of the cross along the one path to Justified True Belief. A
methodology that claims the historical dialectic or the hypotheticodeductive model or phenomenology or historical verstehen or anyone
style of giving reasons to be The One is probably unreasonable. The reasonable rhetorician cannot write down his rules. They are numberless,
because they cover all reasons, and bromidic, because they cover all circumstances. Above all, they change. The rhetorician demands a cheerful, mature, and sober clientele that can bear to face a world of hap
without a drink in hand.
The modernist pedlar, on the other hand, makes large claims, and the
rubes gather. If you will but be a modernist, says he to the amazed economists gathering at the tent, and scient is tic and whatever else is current, following its rules, you will be a good economist, my friend,
whether or not you are honest or imaginative or good. There's nothing
to it, my lad.
Little wonder that youths in science are drunk with methodology:
'Ale, man, ale's the stuff to drink / For fellows whom it hurts to think /
... / And faith, 'tis pleasant till 'tis past: / The mischief is that 'twill not
last." You can understand the attraction of methodological formulas
immediately potable. A textual critic equipped with the formula "the
more sincere text is the better" or an economist with "the statistically
significant coefficient should be retained" is ready for work. That his
work will be wrong bothers him less than that he will not get the stuff
out at all unless he possesses, as he is inclined to say, some Methodology.
Output, man, output's the stuff to get, / So deans and chairmen will
not fret.
The ironic vocabulary of science reflects an uneasiness about taking
methodology as against taking thought: the scientist speaks of "turning the crank" or "grinding it out." Taking thought would seem better
than crank-turning, and a rhetorical criticism of economics is an invitation to take thought. What, you ask yourself in a rhetorical manner, is
the root metaphor in my work? Do I really have evidence for its aptness? I have appealed to an authority here: is it a good one? There my
formal language claims the Objectivity of Science: is the point I'm making really up to it? Here I am making a quantitative argument: what are
my conversational standards of bigness? Should I simulate the results
mathemetically, to show that they have quantitative bite? I appeal to
"theoretical reasons" in this argument: do I mean pretty diagrams? In
what way exactly are they pretty? I depend heavily on introspection for
that point: how can I increase my confidence that my audience has the
same introspection? I appeal to symmetry at this point: have I appealed
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symmetrically? Is there another symmetry I might as well impose, too?
What role do definitions play in my argument? How can I refine my appeal to the argument a fortiori? Rhetorical criticism is an invitation to
take thought but not, to repeat, a formula for good thinking.
The very economics of the matter, to make the now familiar argument
ad hominem, makes such formulas impossible. A scholar in possession of
a scholarly formula more specific than Work and Pray would be a scientific millionaire. Scientific millionaires are not common. Methodology
claims prescience in scientific affairs. The difficulty with prescience is
that it is exactly "pre-science"-that is, knowing things before they are
known, a contradiction. Methodology entails this contradiction. It pretends to know how to achieve knowledge before the knowledge to be
achieved is in place. Life is not so easy. Even anarchists in methodology
face this difficulty if they propose actual policies for science. No one can
know what the scientific future will bring: it may be that the centralized,
bureaucratized, methodized science that threatens to make the scientists into crank-turners, despite the evidence from the history of science
that progress in science is seldom advanced and often retarded by such
a structure, is just the ticket for the twenty-first century. Reasonable arguments can be made on both sides. The historical evidence is merely
one strong argument among others, not the end of the conversation.
The best you can do, then, is to recommend what is good for science
now, and leave the future to the gods. What is good for science now, to
recur to an earlier theme, is good scientists, in most meanings of
"good." A rhetorical criticism of economics can perhaps make economists more modest, tolerant, and self-aware, and improve one of the
conversations of humanity.
12
SINCE RHETORIC
PROSPECTS FOR A
SCIENTIFIC ECONOMICS
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have done a weird thing (all right: two weird things). Economics is a
"conservative" field, at least by comparison with anthropology and
performance art. Good Lord, how have those stiffs reacted?
As I say, to the book (not to the other weird thing) they have reacted
imperfectly from my point of view. True, the book was widely and favorably noticed. I hope you yourself noticed and were impressed. But
even its friends kept getting it wrong in ways that let them go on as before. A wonderful review by Bob Heilbroner in the New York Review of
Books, for example, said, This is nice, but after all it's just about Style, not
Substance. Oh, Bob, Bob. When am I going to persuade you that style is
substance, you master of style? Bob Solow from another ideological direction had the same idea and evokes from me the same response. Oh,
Bob, Bob. The number of economists who have understood the book
and then acted on the understanding in print is to my knowledge small:
Arjo Klamer first (he in fact discovered the point independently in his
Ph.D. dissertation at Duke), Jack Amariglio, John Davis, Jerry Evensky,
Willie Henderson, Don Lavoie, Hans Lind, William Milberg. Not a middle-of-the-road neoclassical establishment figure among them. And
anyway not many of any description.
I am calm about this. Really I am. I strike some people as arrogant,
though more so in my former gender than now, I hope. But truly I am
as modest a lady as anyone could wish, very sweet and unassuming. I
would never assume in particular that people who do not read my books
or do not understand them or do not agree with them are fools and
knaves. Well, some are, and I sometimes feel impelled to say so. That's
nasty: I shouldn't. But I really do not expect people to agree with me.
People haven't agreed with me as a soft Marxist, as a social engineering
transport economist, as a quantitative economic historian, as a Chicago
School economist, as a neoinstitutionalist, as a libertarian, as a global
monetarist, as a free market feminist. No wonder they don't agree with
me as a rhetorician of science.
Of course, like most people, I do assume that those folks are wrong
and I am right. (And in sober truth-can I confide in you as a friend?I am right.) But no matter. I learned the hard way, over and over and over
again, that most people are not open to persuasion to what is right. It's
a pity that it is as true of the average professor carrying The New York
Times as it is of your local Bubba carrying a six-pack, but there you are.
It just goes to show that rhetoric is about something serious. Science
doesn't work by people handing each other platters filled with Results
and Findings to be gobbled up like cocktail canapes. As Schopenhauer
once said, "It is quite natural that we should adopt a defensive and negative attitude towards every new opinion concerning something on
189
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which we have already an opinion of our own. For it forces its way as an
enemy into the previously closed system of our own convictions, shatters the calm of mind we have attained through this system, demands
renewed efforts of us and declares our former efforts to have been in
vain" (Schopenhauer 1851 [1970] No. 19, p. 124). Thomas Kuhn said the
same thing and showed it working in the rhetorical history of science.
I think the first edition and my later writings made a space in economics for thinking about the conversation. But it's still a very small
space. Economists are still unaware of how they talk. I failed. Oh well,
keep trying.
The results of the rhetorical unawareness of economists, I have realized more and more, are unspeakably sad. A lot of good work gets done
in economics, new facts and new ideas. Economists are not stupid or
lazy, not at all. I love the field. I belong to the mainstream and would
float happily in it if it made a bit of sense. But the mainstream of normal
science in economics, I'm afraid, has become a boys' game in a sandbox. It has become silly.
In two usages especially, as I've argued, the field since the 1940s has
become so silly that nothing scientific can be expected until it gets over
them: blackboard economics and statistical significance. The one is the
gift of the Math Department, the other of the Statistics Department. As
I have said, no one could reasonably object to mathematics and statistics in economics. But in the Department of Mathematics and the Department of Statistics the outputs are not scientific findings. They are
theorems about mathematical objects and statistical tests. Unfortunately the economists have not followed the fields like physics and engineering, which use results from the two departments in question
without taking over their theorem-proving intellectual values (I go into
this in more detail in Knowledge and Persuasion in Economics, [1994, chs.
9-13]). In physics and engineering people are interested in how a theory matters in the world, and they have good ways of finding out,
chiefly observation and simulation (not statistical significance). By contrast, nothing scientific comes from the theorems from the departments
of Mathematics or Statistics or Economics, for the good reasons that
(1) the set of theorems is practically unbounded and (2) statistical significance has practically nothing to do with scientific significance. In
practical terms what is published in academic journals of economics is
so irrelevant to the way real scientific persuasion goes on that I can by
now only sit and moan quietly. Please, please, boys: let's get out of the
sandbox. Let's start having a serious scientific rhetoric.
I once had a trans-Atlantic flight seated beside a young economist
who must qualify as the most barbarous scholar I have ever met. That's
190
Since Rhetoric
a stiff competition. He told me that his Scientific duty was to sit at his
computer all day long. (Much as I do, I must admit, writing; but I've
read a book or two.) What he meant is that he did not need to read anything or talk to any businessperson or even copy down government statistics. All he needed to do to be a modern economist was to run regression equations, searching for statistical significance, in standard
data sets, already collected and committed to machine-readable form.
Although I am pretty sure that the young man, now not quite so young,
still has nothing but contempt for the values of actual science and
scholarship that I espouse here, I do feel sorry for him and worry what
will happen when he discovers that his life has been wasted. I look at
the boys playing in the sandbox like a doting aunt and worry: Oh, boys,
it is so foolish what you have allowed yourself to specialize in playing;
please, please start caring about the world and its very interesting economy; you are going to feel very unhappy this evening when you go home
and think over what you have accomplished. It's not the young man's
fault that he is a barbarian. He was taught to be one in a fine graduate
program by nameable modernist econometricians, positive economists, and methodologists with whom I am personally acquainted. By
their fruits ye shall know them.
If I had my wish about how this second edition would be used it
would be that every graduate student in economics would read it and
reflect, to avoid an unscientific barbarism. In my day Koopmans's Three
Essays on the State of Economic Science (1957) was The Book. It was, I realize now, an appalling production, outlining the fraudulent truce between econometrics and mathematical theory that has dominated economics since 195Z We all read it and thought it very fine. My book is
partly an anti-Koopmans.
The cynical and perhaps realistic view is that nothing would actually
change in economics if the graduate students read the second edition of
my book. Certainly you should never underestimate the conservatism
of science. Geologists fought for decades against plate tectonics (I was
perhaps the last person in the United States to be educated in the old
geology, by conservatives at Harvard contemptuous of the crazy notion
that the continents fitted into each other). As George Stigler, America's
leading vulgar Marxist, never tired of arguing, the status quo usually
has lots of money and power to back it. A narrow, ignorant, antihumanistic, unscientific economics is easier to run than anything better.
Look at how popular the old way is with political scientists, for example, who have made themselves into departments of third-rate economists, the leading econowannabes of academic life. Why, it's economics.
No, it's only a modernist economics briefly regnant in the mid-
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twentieth century, as obsolete as the architecture of the 1950s. I think
the cynical view is wrong. I think if the graduate students reflected they
could in ten years remake economics into a serious science and a serious moral philosophy, such as it was with Adam Smith, say.
But the graduate students are frightened. In 1990 Arjo Klamer and
David Colander showed just how frightened in their book The Making
of an Economist. That is certainly a book every graduate student in economics, actual or prospective, must read.
I would like above all with my book to encourage the graduate students, to help them overcome their careerist fears. I can make the argument on wholly prudential grounds. A cute blackboard argument is
that in choosing graduate school you have chosen a low-income option
anyway. You could have gone to law school or business school, and
being smart and hardworking you would have done well. But you
wanted to be an economist, perhaps a professor of economics. Having
chosen that lower income stream it is inconsistent to distort your intellectuallife in fear of ... a lower income steam. Be courageous. You've
chosen to be so anyway: you might as well get credit for it.
Yes, I know. The cute blackboard argument is not very persuasive. But
haven't I been saying that? A more serious argument is empirical. It is
the case now that graduate students who actually discover something
about the economic world-instead of writing three theoretical essays
in search of a theme-and find it out in ways that sidestep the killing
field of statistical significance (by gathering utterly new facts, for example) get better jobs. Look around. You'll find it's so. Even the older
boys playing in the sandbox know instinctively when someone shows
up with serious scientific intent. They try to hire her. When I was a
graduate student most Ph.D. dissertations were empirical, and because
inverting even a 10-by-10 matrix was difficult in 1965 the empirical
work was actually about the world, not game-playing with statistical
significance. Then gradually the dissertations all became theoretical.
Even when they were called "empirical" they were exercises in imaginary worlds undisciplined by the overwhelming question: How Big is
Big? Or, sadly, they fell for the idea that statistical significance tells.
Now they are shifting back. On prudential grounds, my dears, be courageous. If you just get up and walk out of the sandbox, insisting on learning about the economic world and thinking hard about what you have
learned in light of the history of economic ideas since Smith, you will
prosper.
But the most serious argument I can make has nothing to do with
prudence. It therefore contradicts the economics of Jeremy Bentham
and George Stigler and Paul Samuelson and says, No, identity matters,
192
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too. Another way of saying it is that virtues aside from Prudence matter. Courage, Temperance, Justice, Love. If you ever read Adam Smith's
other book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, you will find an articulation
of the five virtues that puts the Prudence of The Wealth of Nations in its
proper context.
If we will be who we are, take our courage, and use it, we can change
economics. People sometimes ask me how my views of economics have
changed since I became a woman. It's not been long, and I am, goodness
knows, nothing like an expert at Being a Woman. In some important
ways I never will be, alas. Still, I see some differences. The virtue of
Love, it seems to me, belongs in any serious science of economics, and
radically changes even the studies of Prudence. The boys' games seem
to me now to be even sillier than I had thought. A few other things, and
more to come, I expect.
But what I mainly learned is that a life must be itself, and in a rich,
free country like ours it can be. Do this (no, no, I don't mean change
gender unless you have to: it's very inconvenient!). Be courageous and
be yourself. People do not come into economics mainly because they
like the sandbox games at present taking place in the field. Some do; but
not most people. Most people want to change the world or make a scientific contribution. With such noble goals the first thing to do is to
break through the phony rhetoric of modern economics and bring economics, that glorious conversation since Adam Smith, back into the
conversation of humankind.
Please, my dears, please.
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INDEX
Boulding, Kenneth, 40
Braudel, Fernand, 102
Bronowski, Jacob, 40, 61, 184
Bruns, Gerald, xv, 11
Burke, Kenneth, xvi, xviii, 21, 23, 24, 26,
32,49-51,66,84
Caldwell, Bruce, xvii, 162
Campbell, John, 59, 60
capitol: human, 43
capital market literature, nearly universal
misuse of statistical significance in, 134
Cato, 169
Catullus, 70
Chandler, Alfred, 97
Chicago school, xi, 16, 99,144,188
Cicero, Marcus, 6, 48, 66, 120, 162, 169,
183
Clark, Kim, 129
ciiometrics, 74, 75, 77, 84
Coase, Ronald, xiii, xvii, 57, 87-99,152,
154
Coase's Theorem, 88
Cochrane, John, xvii, 39
Cohen, Kalman, 145
Collander, David, 191
Collins, Harry, xvii, 149
common topics, 81-82
context of discovery, 58, 62, 144, 156, 177
conversation: of humankind, xiv, xvi,
xviii, 162, 179, 192; as norm for science,
xix, xx, 51, 67, 69, 71, 82, 86, 100, 107-9,
128,131,139,154,160-63,167, 175, 178,
179,189
Cooley, T. E, 24
Copi, Irving, 182-83
Corbett, Edward P. J., 6
Cos gel, Metin, 98
Crain, Robert, 101
critical theory, 64
Crosman, Richard, 174
Crowley, Sharon, 6
Cyert, Richard, 145
219
220
Index
Darby, Michael, 128, 129
Darwin, Charles 59-60, 150
Davis, John, 188
Davis, Lance, 74, 107
Davis, Philip J., 165-66
de Man, Paul, 173
de Marchi, Neil, xvii, 146
Debreu, Gerard, 5-6, 92
deconstruction, 15-17, 181
DeGroot, Morris, 123, 126
demand, law of, analyzed rhetorically,
23-28,178
demarcation, 22, 161, 176
demarcation line, 25
Denton, Frank, xvii, 120, 124
Descartes, Rene, 59, 61, 69, 87, 98, 108, 141,
147, 152, 159, 164, 166
Dettmer, Helena R., 70-72
Dewey, John, 146, 158, 164, 169, 171, 173, 184
diachronic, approaches to science, 29-31
diallage, 77, 79
discovery. See context of
Domar, Evsey, 50
Dudley-Evans, Tony, 10-11
Duhem, Pierre, 59,148,149
Eagleton, Terry, 174
econometrics, 112-38
Edgeworth, F. Y., 36, 37, 121
Einstein, Albert, 21, 53,152,156,157
Elster, Jon, 32
enthymemes, 93
equilibrium, 14, 15
ethics, 15,47, 99, 143
ethos, 7-9, 11, 84-85, 87-88
Euler, Leonhard, 8, 68-70, 166
Evensky, Jerry, 188
evolutionary biology: as a model for
economics, xxi, 26
exogeneity: as employment, 15
exordium, 7, 87, 90
expectations: rational, 52-58, 62-64
falsification, 64, 148-50
feminism, 192
feminist, xiii
Feyerabend, Paul, xii, xv, xviii, 142, 152,
159, 168, 169
figures of speech, 12. See also Irony;
Metaphor; Metonymy; Synecdoche
221
Index
Harsanyi, John, 34
Hausman, Daniel, xvii, 45,127
Hawke, Gary, xvii, 75
Hayek, Friedrick von, 32
Heidegger, Martin, xix, 184
Heilbroner, Bob, 188
Heinzelmann, Kurt, 32
Henderson, Willie, 10-11, 40, 188
Henkel, Ramon, 121, 123
Hersh, Reuben, 165-66
Hesse, Mary, 12
Hicks, J. R, 33, 36, 37, 87, 139, 177
Hilbert's program, 85, 165
Hirsch, Abraham, xvii, 146
Hirsch, E. D., 174
Hirschman, Albert, xvii, 22, 32, 40
history: as a model for economics, xxi
Hoel, Paul, 119
Hogben, Lancelot, 121
Homo economicu5, 31
Horace, 37, 70, 71
Horsburgh, H. J. N., 41
Housman, A. E., 22, 72-73, 185
Houthakker, Hendrick, 24, 110
Hughes, J. R T., xvii, 74
Hume, David, 152, 164, 183
Hume's Golden Fork, 144, 147, 151
Hutchison, Terence, 144, 148, 167, 171, 181
hypothetico-deductive model, 60, 63, 144,
185
implied author, 7-9, 84-85
implied reader, 19
institutionalism, 30, 97, 106
invention, 10-11
Iowa City view of market integration, 109
irony, 50, 77, 79
Iser, Wolfgang, 17
James,William,24
Johnston,J. L 117, 119, 124
Jones, G. T., 50
Jonsen, Albert, 99
Kelvin, William Thompson, Lord, 20,143
Kelvin's Dictum, 151
Kendall, M. G., 121
Kennedy, George A., 6
Kennedy, Peter, 124
Keynes, John Maynard, 18, 36, 53, 104
222
Index
Masica, Colin, 106
mathematics: department of as source of
non-scientific values, 189
mathematics in economics, 58, 139
Mechling, Elizabeth Walker, 65
Mechling, Jay, 65
Megill, Allan, xv
Mendel, Gregor, 152-53
metaphor, xiii, xix, 12, 40
methodology, 156-62
metonymy, 49
Milberg, William, 188
Mill, James, 60
Mishkin, Frederic, 126
Mitchell, Wesley Clair, 16-17
modernism, xii, xxi, 22, 27, 28, 58, 142-55,
183; defined, 141; Ten commandments
of, 143-44; in Muth, 59-73
monetarism, 14-15,53
Moore, David, 123
Morgenstern, Oskar, 82
Morrison, Denton, 121, 123
Mosteller, Frederick, 25
Mulkay, Michael, xviii, 10, 17, 18
Muth, John, 52-73, 78, 79, 80, 81, 94,151,152
narratology, xiii-xv
Nelson, John, xv
Nelson, Julie, 176
Newman, John Henry, Cardinal, 31, 158,
166,183
Neyman, Jerzy, 122, 125
Nicholas, Stephen, 7-9
Novick, Peter, xvii, 74, 171, 175
Oakeshott, Michael, xviii, 162
objectivity, 108
Olbrechts-Tyteca, Lucy, 47
Olson, Mancur, 22
oration: six part of, 90-91
Ortony, Andrew, 40
Palmer,1. R., 105, 106
paramologia, 79
Passmore, John, 38, 39, 147
Pearson, E. S., 122, 125
Pearson, Karl, 120, 121, 148, 171-73
Perelman, Chaim, 142
Perlman, Mark, 47, 167
Piers Plowman, 178
Polya, George, 68
Popper, Karl, xi, 62, 145, 147, 157, 158
positivism, xi, 22, 99
Posner, Richard, 3-5,15
prediction, 53,150-51
Prince, Gerald,13-14
production functions, 44-45, 48-50
prudence: economics as science of, 192
purchasing power parity, 109-15
Purves, Roger, 123
Quine, Willard, 142, 148, 180, 181, 183
Quintilian, Marcus, 169
Rabinowitz, Peter, 18
racism: in positivism, 171-73
Ramus, Peter, 164
rational expectations, 53-65, 69
Rawls, John, 34
Reynolds, 1. D., 22
Rhetoric of Inquiry, xv, xxi
rhetoric: defined, xix-xx, 4-5; three parts
of,94
Rhetorical Tetrad, 19
Ricardo, David, 37, 150, 172
Richards, I. A., 32-34, 42, 156
Roberts, Harry v., 123, 125
Roll, Richard, 134, 146
Romer, Christina, 127, 128, 129
Root-Bernstein, Robert, 152-53
Rorty, Amelie Oksenberg, xvii, 59, 85-86,
162,163
Rorty, Richard, xvi, xvii, xviii, 40, 142,
159,162,164,169,175,184
Rosen, Stanley, 162, 184
Rosenberg, Alexander, 148, 171
Rosenblatt, Louise, 84
Rossetti, Jane, 16
Rostow, Walt, 74, 75, 76
Ruskin, John, 98
Russell, Bertrand, 147, 171
Sachs, Jeffrey, 128
St. Augustine, 11
Samuelson, Paul, 28, 33, 35-38, 87, 88, 92,
93,95,98,99,113,146,148,152,191
223
Index
Sargent, Thomas, 52, 58
Saussure, Ferdinand de, 28-31, 54, 106
Schelling, Thomas, 22
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 188, 189
Schultz, Theodore, 43, 50, 99
Schuster, J. A., 159
Schwartz, Anna J., 74, 153-54
science: as collection of literary forms, 21,
23; and peculiar English, definition of,
20-21, 25, 27
Scitovsky; Tibor, 31
Searle, John, 23, 183
Sen, Amartya, 34
Sharpe, William, 146
Shell, Marc, 32
significance: statistical, xii, 112-38
Simon, Julian, 25
Smith, Adam, 14, 30, 42, 75, 95, 96, 150,
162,191,192
sociology of science, xi
Solow, Robert, xvi,S, 9, 48, 49, 50, 51,62,
77, 152, 188
special topics, 66-67, 82-83
Spitzer, Alan, 171
Spooner, Frank, xvii, 102
sports metaphors, 12-13
Sprachethik, 160, 163
Stanley; Steven, 67-68
statistical significance, 112-38, 189
Stebbing, L. Susan, 182-83
Stein, Herbert,S
Steiner, George, 173-74
Steiner, Mark, xii, 68, 69
Stigler, George, xi, 37, 51, 88, 99, 144, 190,
191
Stone, Lawrence, 181
storeroom of rhetorical devices, 66-67
story: as argument in economics, 13-15,
25
Stove, David, 173
style, 10-11,52,58,94
Summerson, John,S
Supple, Barry, 81
symmetry; 26
synchronic, approaches to science, 29-31,
105
synecdoche, 50
Theil, Hans, 24
Thomas, Mark, 9
Thurow, Lester, 12-13
Tobin, James, 61,154
Todorov; Tzvetan, 18
Toulmin, Stephen, xv, xvii, xviii, 99, 142,
168,179,184
transaction costs, 97
tropes, four master, 49
Truth, 175, 179-83
Tufte, Edward, 170
Tukey; John, 25
Turnovsky; Stephen, 53
Two Cambridges, 45
upperbound: argument from, 76, 81-82
Venn, John, 121, 123
von Mises, Ludwig, 32, 151
Wald, Abraham, 122, 164
Wallis, W. Allen, 96, 123, 125
Walras, Leon, 28
Ward, Benjamin, 38
Warner, Martin, 39
Weinberg, Steven, 21,159
Whately; Richard, 46
White, Hayden, 10, 15, 51
Williamson, Jeffrey; 39, 83
Wilson, N. G., 22
Wonnacott, Ronald, 124
Wonnacott, Thomas, 124
Woolf, Virginia, 17
Zecher, J. Richard, 103, 111, 154
Zeckhauser, Richard, 39
Zellner, Arnold, 52
Ziliak, Steve, 125, 131